Konflikt, Kommunikation Und Interessengruppenbeziehungen II

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Konflikt, Kommunikation und Intergruppenbeziehungen II Conflict, Communication and Intergroup Relations II

Oddgeir Tveiten Kontakt-Erziehung, alte und neue Medien: Reflexionen über eine Friedensinitiative in Norwegen Contact education, old and new media: Reflections on a peace-building initiative in Norway

Wilhelm Kempf Die Wirkung politischer Nachrichten auf die Einschätzung des israelisch- palästinensischen Konfliktes seitens deutscher Studenten The impact of political news on German students' assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Stig Arne Nohrstedt & Rune Ottosen Kriegsjournalismus in der Bedrohungsgesellschaft: Friedensjournalismus als Strategie zu Herausforderung der gelenkten Kultur der Angst? War journalism in the threat Society: Peace journalism as a strategy for challenging the mediated culture of fear?

Wassilios Baros Bildung und Überprüfung von Hypothesen in der Migrationsforschung Construction and testing of hypotheses in migration research

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Oddgeir Tveiten Kontakt-Erziehung, alte und neue Medien: Reflexionen über eine Friedensinitiative in Norwegen

2001 wurde in Südnorwegen eine Friedensorganisation gegründet, die ein regionales Gestapo-Hauptquartier aus dem 2. Weltkrieg in einen gemeinnützigen Veranstaltungsort umwandelte, dessen Vision es war, sich zu einem national anerkannten Friedenserziehungsforum zu entwickeln. In den ersten beiden Jahren war das Zentrum von Bankrott und geringer Anerkennung bedroht. Dann setzte sich aber doch die angestrebte Vision durch - Erzbischof Desmond Tutu aus Südafrika kam zweimal zu Besuch, und es wurde eine Joint Venture Vereinbarung mit dem von der UNESCO anerkannten Robben-Island-Heritage Museum in Cape Town unterzeichnet. Weitere Kooperationsvereinbarungen folgten. Aber was hatte diese Vision an sich, das plötzlich die Aufmerksamkeit von in der Friedensarbeit engagierten Individuen und Organisationen auf sich zog? Können wir aus der Geschichte des Zentrums etwas über Friedenserziehung als eine Art narrativer Strategie lernen?

Volltext (in Englisch)

Zum Autor: Oddgeir Tveiten ist Professor für politische Kommunikation an der Universität von Adger in Südnorwegen. Er hat an der Schule für Journalismus und Massenkommunikation der Universität von Minnesota promoviert und ist derzeit Gastdozent am Department of Communication an der Stanford University, wo er an einem Buch über globalen Journalismus arbeitet. Seine neueste Veröffentlichung ist ein Buch in norwegischer Sprache über politische Kommunikation, das im November 2008 erscheinen wird. eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Oddgeir Tveiten Contact education, old and new media: Reflections on a peace-building initiative in Norway

In 2001, a peace foundation was set up in Southern Norway, where a regional WW II Gestapo headquarters became a non-profit venue with a vision of becoming a nationally recognized peace education center. The first two years saw regular threats of bankruptcy and little recognition. Then, the vision took hold Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa came to visit twice, and a joint venture agreement was signed with the UNESCO-listed Robben Island Heritage Museum in Cape Town. Several other alliances were forged. But what was it about this vision that suddenly caught the attention of individuals and organizations engaged in peace work? Can we learn something from the history of the center about peace education as a kind of narrative strategy?

full text (in English)

On the author: Oddgeir Tveiten is Associate Professor of Political Communication at the University of Agder in Southern Norway. He holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Communication, Stanford University, where he is writing a book on global journalism. His most recent book, published in Norwegian, deals with political communication and is scheduled to appear in November 2008. eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Oddgeir Tveiten Contact education, old and new media: Reflections on a peace-building initiative in Norway

Kurzfassung: 2001 wurde in Südnorwegen eine Friedensorganisation gegründet, die ein regionales Gestapo-Hauptquartier aus dem 2. Welt- krieg in einen gemeinnützigen Veranstaltungsort umwandelte, dessen Vision es war, sich zu einem national anerkannten Friedenserzie- hungsforum zu entwickeln. In den ersten beiden Jahren war das Zentrum von Bankrott und geringer Anerkennung bedroht. Dann setzte sich aber doch die angestrebte Vision durch - Erzbischof Desmond Tutu aus Südafrika kam zweimal zu Besuch, und es wurde eine Joint Venture Vereinbarung mit dem von der UNESCO anerkannten Robben-Island-Heritage Museum in Cape Town unterzeichnet. Weitere Ko- operationsvereinbarungen folgten. Aber was hatte diese Vision an sich, das plötzlich die Aufmerksamkeit von in der Friedensarbeit engagierten Individuen und Organisationen auf sich zog? Können wir aus der Geschichte des Zentrums etwas über Friedenserziehung als eine Art narrativer Strategie lernen?

Abstract: In 2001, a peace foundation was set up in Southern Norway, where a regional WW II Gestapo headquarters became a non-profit venue with a vision of becoming a nationally recognized peace education center. The first two years saw regular threats of bankruptcy and little recognition. Then, the vision took hold - Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa came to visit twice, and a joint venture agreement was signed with the UNESCO-listed Robben Island Heritage Museum in Cape Town. Several other alliances were forged. But what was it about this vision that suddenly caught the attention of individuals and organizations engaged in peace work? Can we learn something from the history of the center about peace education as a kind of narrative strategy?

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Introduction Each year, I take my BA and MA students in political communication to a place called Stiftelsen Arkivet, in the city of Kris- tiansand in Southern Norway. The venue is probably not familiar to readers of this article, but the questions we discuss there are: how does one approach conflict history, war memories and historical knowledge of human rights atrocities with the aim of learning things of value and salience for understanding contemporary wars and conflicts in the world? What place does collective war memorization have in society – and what do war memories contribute to our basic understanding of conflict escalation and reduction? How might we apply insights from the broad range of the social sciences and the hu- manities in a constructive panorama of contemporary peace education to transform conflicts from violent to non-violent alternatives? Stiftelsen Arkivet (The Archives Foundation) is a newly established peace documentation center with an already consoli- dated name recognition in Norway, to some extent in the Nordic countries, and increasingly also internationally.1 It began with modest ambitions in 2001, struggling continually against bankruptcy. In the mid-1990s it appeared that the Norwegian government intended to move the regional division of the governmental archives system to a new venue, while also in- tending to sell the building that had housed them until then.2 The similar names should not be confused: the state’s archival foundation is a government institution responsible for all governmental documents, whereas Stiftelsen Arkivet is an NGO. A group of individuals got together to try to secure a different fate for the building, as it has a strong historical identity. During the German occupation of Norway 1940-45, the house served as the regional headquarters for the Geheime Staat- spolizei – the Gestapo. It was locally known during the occupation as the "House of Terror." And now, in 1999, the initiative finally succeeded: the government abandoned plans for a sale and donated the house to the museum advocates, on the condition that they use it for peace-building purposes. Within 12 months, the doors of the new Arkivet were opened to the public. Authentic artifacts from the war years had been returned after decades in private and public possession. Returned to their original positions, these artifacts were now presented in the museum by retired and unpaid voluntary guides. The whole building had been restored and renovated. What opened in 2001 was a volunteer-supported war museum and peace documentation center with a vision that sometime in the future it could become a professional, nationally recognized peace education center.3 For the first two years, the foundation was often in danger of bankruptcy and received little recognition. Then, the vision took hold – Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa came to visit twice, and exchange programs were developed with the Desmond Tutu Peace Center, as well as with the UNESCO-listed Robben Island Heritage Museum in Cape Town. Several other cooperative relationships were forged, and a multimedia project gained national tenure for a simple reason: New media technologies were brought to bear on the challenge of telling History through a multi-media lens. By 2007, exchange agreements had also been signed with like-minded institutions in Cambodia and Spain. The center became an individual item on the national budget in 2005, with allocations increasing by the year. Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre now regu- larly refers to it as a model of NGO-based peace education. By the year 2007, 6500 students were visiting the center an- nually, while another 3-4000 adult visitors find their way there as tourists, conference participants or in some other capacity. For most of its brief history, the center was run by non-paid volunteers.

Considering the rapid growth of the center, it seems interesting to address the question of what kind of a communicative phenomenon it actually is – what potential it may have as a venue for peace education, how it bridges academia and the NGO-sector? Does it reflect other role models or has it created its own? Can it become a role model for others – if so, what are the key assets? What does it reflect in terms of possibilities for peace education in schools, in universities, in NGOs and society at large? What was it about the vision that somehow seemed to inspire individuals and organizations engaged in peace work? Can we learn something about peace education and narrative strategy?

Outline of the article An invitation to speak at the 20th Annual Conference of the German Peace Psychology Association on "Conflict, Communi- cation and Intergroup Relations" in June 2007 provided an occasion to structure some experiences from three years as head and coordinator of research and development at the center. There are quite obvious similarities between the visions of Stiftelsen Arkivet in Kristiansand and, say, for instance, Villa ten Hompel in Münster, Germany, the Truth and Reconcil- iation Committee in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa, the Robben Island Heritage Museum in Cape Town, South

1. As the foundation itself intentionally uses its Norwegian name in order to make it familiar to the public, I will follow suit in this article and refer to either the building as Arkivet, or the foundation as Stiftelsen Arkivet. 2. http://www.riksarkivet.no/english/about.html 3. http://www.stiftelsen-arkivet.no/english

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Africa, or the Documentation Centre of Cambodia.1 All of these are by now collaborating partners with Stiftelsen Arkivet, as is the war memorial museum in Guernica, Spain. They are all approaches to building peace based on confrontation with the after-effects of war. As such, they share key elements. However, the contexts are also very different. Stiftelsen Arkivet is a small venue catering to predominantly middle-class citizens of a very prosperous and peaceful part of the world, by most comparisons. South African contexts both before and after apartheid may have parallels to processes centering around the Second World War (hereafter referred to as WW II), which is the key reference point in the Norwegian peace center. However, exactly how one conceptualizes these relationships and their relevance for peace education is an immensely complex issue. Words such as "peace" and "war" tend to have much more complicated meanings than what we think of in everyday speech. Peace for the average Norwegian can hardly be compared to peace for the average Cambodian – yet we continue to employ the word as though it had a fixed meaning. A first issue for a peace education venue is to come to grips with the term peace itself, and only thereafter might one begin to consider aspects of education in relation to it. In trying to relate key insights from my experiences with Stiftelsen Arkivet, I will draw up the rudiments of a theoretical framework of peace education, but principally this article is a case study based on practical experiences, as well as notes and interviews with visitors and students during the stage when I was engaged in creating the venue.2 My sense of the term case study in this context is simply to structure and organize facts and the data of experience in such a way that they form a coherent reflection, with the ambition of paving the way for a more cogent theoretical treatment later on. The article presents some ideas concerning the term "contact education," as an attempt to connect Stiftelsen Arkivet to the vast and heterogeneous body of literature that one might use to elaborate on peace education as a distinct field within peace studies. As education is quite obviously also an aspect of communication, there is reason to also reflect on the multi-modality involved in combining interpersonal communication with multi-media technology for educational purposes.

Stiftelsen Arkivet In order to construct a case study, a conceptual framework is needed that provides some analytical dimensions. And following from the introduction above, it seems possible to define Stiftelsen Arkivet as a non-governmental organization with an approach to peace education that is loose: it is not formalized, nor necessarily educational in the strict sense of the word, but more akin to what in German is called Bildung and in Norwegian dannelse. Although there is no single corresponding word in the English language, the meaning is synonymous with education for life – learning how to contextualize yourself, learning canonical values from history and literature, understanding the origins of yourself and your culture – but also learning the practical value and salience of cultural codes. In this broad sense, the concept of peace education acquires a quite inclusive meaning. In trying to envisage a place for such an inclusive concept, one might refer to the Transcend Peace University – of which the UN is a partner, and Johan Galtung presiding rector:3 21 different courses are listed in the website, immediately suggesting the conclusion that no single, regular university department anywhere at any time could cover degrees in peace studies alone. The subject is too broad. Neither could a single university. Area knowledge and conflict history insights must be pooled. And neither could formal academic education as such, simply because there is an element of participation, application and bottoms-up thinking involved in a working peace education. A vision like this would seem to run parallel to John Keane’s (2003; 1998) convincing attempt to outline what he calls "a global civil society." It would also have a bearing on Adam B. Seligman’s (1992) argument in The Idea of a Civil Society, where he states that studies of politics and political culture need to reclaim the complex interrelationship of social movements, political parties, interest organizations, educational institutions, arts and leisure in a more integrative totality in order to further elaborate the ancient idea of society as a Civil society. In this article I will apply such ideas to understanding Stiftelsen Arkivet, its roles and its necessity. Stiftelsen Arkivet is located in a building commonly referred to as Arkivet (The Archive). It is a four-story building with a view of the harbor and the city center.4 The stately concrete house had, as mentioned, for decades been the venue of the regional offices of the

1. http://www.muenster.de/stadt/villa-ten-hompel; for the home page of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission see http://www.doj.gov.za/trc; for Robben Island Heritage Museum see http://www.robben-island.org.za; for the Documentation Centre of Cambodia see http://www.dccam.org. 2. The conference was held June 15-17, 2007 in Constance, Germany (Konstanz). This article is a reworked version of a paper I presented there entitled Peace Education through New Media: A Case Study of a Local Peace Initiative in Southern Norway. A different version of the same research issue was presented in Paris, July 2007, at the International Association of Mass Commu- nication Research biannual conference. Emphasis in the latter article was more oriented towards the field of participant communication, but some elements have been worked into this written version of the Constance presentation. 3. http://www.transcend.org. 4. Kristiansand is a city of 75,000 people, a city that in 2007 acquired its own university. Institutions like Stiftelsen Arkivet perform a much needed function as affiliated adjunct knowledge institutions for the university, Traditionally, Kristiansand has only had a university college, a teachers college and some other smaller academic venues. In the last 10 years there has arisen a new situation of academic competition, a fact that has some bearing on the understanding of Stiftelsen Arkivet’s rapid establishment.

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Norwegian National Archives. During the WW II occupation, Arkivet assumed another identity, as it was used as the regional headquarters of the Gestapo. This is in other words the house where members of the regional resistance movement in Southern Norway were incarcerated, interrogated and tortured. Throughout the post-WW II years, stories of this "House of Terror" have been told as part of the regional folk narrative, while much has also been actively not told – suppressed, partially forgotten, rendered taboo in the interest of moving forward. No doubt, the force with which the repercussions to this taboo-culture hit the city of Kristiansand when the house was re-opened surprised many people. The house is in a sense a narrative all by itself, although younger generations had never even heard the term "House of Terror" at all. Stiftelsen Arkivet started its work in 2001, with two employees and a large number of non-paid volunteers. A number of conferences and seminars set the activity in motion. There was a general recognition that the response was unexpectedly tense, deep, and emotional. Few places in contemporary Norwegian society create occasions and possibilities for working through emotions with the same intensity – people have been known to burst into tears before its exhibits, and not infre- quently. Stiftelsen Arkivet now occupies the top floor of the Arkivet building, and there are 13 employees helping school- teachers and their pupils, university students, tourists, and other visitors, while also running a website, conferences and seminars, as well as doing research – although at a fledgling level. On the top floor one finds the offices, seminar rooms and a small conference area from which Stiftelsen Arkivet carries on its peace initiative. The basement floor of the four-story building is an exhibit with the fully restored torture chamber, in- carceration rooms, an exhibition of artifacts from everyday life in occupied Norway, and a restored Gestapo headquarters, displaying and narrating the story of the regional German occupation. The two floors in between are rented by regional branches of such humanitarian organizations as The Red Cross, Save the Children, Amnesty International, Rotary, The UN Foundation and others. It is in many respects the presence of these NGOs in the house that best explains the peculiar mix of war and peace focal points that characterizes house activities. By the end of 2007, approximately 40 employees were working in the building altogether, which is an increase of 38 since the doors first opened. Visitors are typically taken on a tour of the basement, where non-paid staffers introduce them to both local war history and humanitarian thinking concerning contemporary conflict management. There is also a seminar room in the basement, amidst exhibits of the local resistance. The latest addition is a multi-media auditorium in the basement’s sublevel. Both are used during the tours. On the way, visitors stop at the NGO-offices and gain an insight into their work on contemporary issues. The contrast between the tour’s beginning and its end is extreme for those who come to visit here: in the top floor conference room a huge tapestry adorns one whole wall. It is a story told visually, in a room with a view of the harbor through a number of large windows. Below, the basement is as dark and sinister as its story of fear, torture and violent confinement.

Commissioned by Stiftelsen Arkivet, and woven by a gifted and distinguished artist from the region, the 15 feet long and 12 feet tall tapestry (see figure 1) is an artwork that interprets the story of the war in Southern Norway though needle and

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thread, as well as through symbols and emotions. It is a powerful story, told in very contrasting colors and with interwoven imagery of hope, depression, violence, resistance, national symbols of solidarity, and foreign symbols of fear and destruction. It functions as a powerful testimony to a mode of communication that both predates and outdates our modern multi- media of text and image communication. This is where the volunteer guides end their tours with visitors. The guides, who have little formal training in storytelling, find in the tapestry a focal point for a narrative that no high-definition TV screen or Powerpoint presentation could ever hope to approximate. Thus, the ways in which Stiftelsen Arkivet approaches its vision offer an opportunity to assess not just its concept of peace education, but also its approach to peace narratives as well.

Notes on peace education: communication, narrative, truth Applying the idea of narrative in elaborating on Stiftelsen Arkivet seems plausible, but also somewhat out of place. With the word narrative we first and foremost think of the concept of story – something told to someone by someone else. How- ever, narrative theory is today in part also an academic fashion trend, in part a meta-theory, in part a research paradigm, or a group of related theoretical orientations. Only a fraction of the orientations can be said to represent applicable narrative theory in studies of person-to-person communication. Be that as it may, it is quite possible to stick to the idea that narrative is simply a story-telling approach to the study of culture and social communication. I do not have in mind the more theo- retically fine-tuned theories at this time. I am rather thinking of the Arkivet Narrative as an overarching context (meta- narrative) for understanding – in Clifford Geertz’s (1973) terminology – "what they are up to." Quite clearly, understanding the narrative scheme that is woven into the tapestry, for instance, helps us to understand the Arkivet institution. I also meet myself when I attempt to do so, as I am a former R&D employee. In that respect, this article is also an elaboration on my points of view concerning Stiftelsen Arkivet as an aspect of narrative method. When I began in 2002, I built on points of linkage between education, journalism (my field) and communication. Without communication, there can be no such thing as journalism or education. And one might think of journalism as an aspect of both narrative and education – as for instance Jake Lynch (2007) seems to do in his endeavor to teach peace journalism as course curricula in journalism education.1 In response to some questions raised during my Constance presentation, I referred to James Carey (1987), who once re- marked that "communication is a wonderful thing": much as fish are not aware that they swim in water until they are out of the water, most people are only vaguely aware of how much their existence depends upon narratives. In the book I referred to, Carey invoked John Dewey’s educational philosophy – it was in fact Dewey who authored the quote. And one will not have to read very far in the literature on communication and civil society before one encounters the debates between John Dewey and the more familiar figure of Walter Lippmann (Splichal, 1999). In contrast to intellectual journalist Lippmann, philosopher Dewey did not place so much emphasis on the media in his thoughts on communication. Their debate concerned a more basic quarrel over the capacity of the masses to make sense of complex matters. Lippmann took an elitist view, whereas Dewey emphasized partnership and learning through participation. And I can think of few other debates in academic history that move more directly to the intersection point of peace, journalism and education. The common point is communication, yet communication has for a very long time been a neglected subject in studies of politics and international relations. By focusing on the concept of "communication" in attempts to define a field called "peace education," one necessarily has to deal with the paradoxical and contradictory nature of the term "peace" itself, as it appears within different academic fields and levels of education. How can we talk of peace education when we educate students about war and conflict, for instance? In a basic sense, theology, moral philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology all approach the process of peace building from the vantage point of communication. One might also, with a stretch of the imagination, invoke the economist and peace research veteran Kenneth Boulding (1978), who throughout his career showed an inclination to im- plicitly employ a great deal of communication philosophy in his mostly structurally oriented research on war and peace. Communication is essential in social theory, according to Boulding – and he is not alone in holding this view.2 Peace research over a period spanning close to fifty years reflects that same position. By communication studies, we are referring not to media studies, but to the range of interdisciplinary, sub-disciplinary and non-disciplinary areas in which the concept of communication is part of the vocabulary. Peace, like communication, is ‘a wonderful thing’, but possibly even harder to define. Peace education, like peace research, is not a strict discipline, but rather an orientation, albeit an increasingly discipline-like one. By and large, peace education has no theory of its own that is commonly shared, but one need not look very far before one encounters references to Johan Galtung and his distinction between direct obstacles to peace, cultural obstacles to peace, and structural obstacles to peace (Brock-Utne, 2004; Perez, 2006; Galtung & Langlois, 2006). Neither does one have to search very hard before

1. Among other things, he has one such course in Galtung’s portfolio. 2. His position is largely the same in the older book, The Meaning of the 20th Century, from 1965.

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certain themes from development and poverty studies come into focus – for instance the educational philosophies of Freire and Illich (Kent, 1977). Concepts such as consciousness invoke perhaps a reference to Marxist philosophies of alienation, on the one hand, and a pluralist ideal of global exchange in the sense of, for instance, former-US Senator William Fulbright, on the other. A practical view may be to take Galtung’s emphasis on obstacles as a starting point. From there one may say that peace education combines a processual strategy with a structuralist one, a micro-view with a macro-view, an historical orientation with a contemporary and comparative one, an academic view with a grass-roots view on competence building. In short, it takes everything and positions it around the word "peace," firmly placed in the center, with all the implicit consequences. What Galtung has in mind is nothing short of a new educational paradigm, with peace as the pivotal point and the focal lens.

Contact education But how do we think of peace education as a form of communication? What is communication, in addition to being another of those unclear words? One such meaning that we might put to use comes from Mark Kramer (2005), who begins an elaboration of the term narrative journalism with an emphasis on contact – or meaningful contact. Kramer, Director of the Nieman Program on Nar- rative Journalism at Harvard University, once asked himself what he meant by the term narrative journalism? On our side, we might ask ourselves what we mean by the term narrative (peace) education? As documented above, the key ingredient in Stiftelsen Arkivet’s approach is exactly that: narrative. That is also where peace education and peace journalism enter into the common equation. And it is, arguably, also where we find the center of the contours of a common theory of peace education: Kramer first labeled narrative journalism "contactful journalism" – and we might add contactfull education: The writer (ed- ucator) contacts the reader (student):1

It’s journalism that doesn’t assume that the reader is a robot, that acknowledges the reader knows a lot…and feels…and sniggers…and gets wild. Perhaps the question, "What’s up with this narrative stuff?" is an uneasy one. It’s a question that denotes factions and discomfort with the clear movement toward more narrative in newspapers. Kramer adds:

Narrative denotes writing with character; action that unfolds over time; the interpretable voice of the storyteller in an area with a somewhat discernable personality; and some sense of relationship to the reader, viewer, listener; and leads the audience to a point of realization or destination (2005: 7). I will take this to mean that through narrative and contact, (peace) journalism and (peace) education are kindred spirits to the extent that they both work from the starting point of audience participatory engagement. The compelling truth-value of the fact being told is juxtaposed to the ethos of the person who is telling. This is in turn inseparable from the context of the telling and the purposes that lie behind the telling. We are in other words scratching the surface of a Habermas-inspired communication philosophy, but I prefer to remain much more practical, down to earth, and keep an emphasis on narrative and drama rather than rationality and argumentation. Peace journalism, like peace education, is the challenge of letting more voices speak, and letting them speak in a way that makes sense to themselves with less regard for structure and constraints – more regard for emotion, place, and response. More direct. More contact. In fact, teaching peace issues at Stiftelsen Arkivet suggests another of Kramer’s insights:

Once an audience is set to willingly follow the teller, throw in such topical digressions – shifting gladly between scenes – so that the reader will assemble in the mind a sequence of what are called sub-textual realizations. They’re not there. You read the text about the dog and you go "aha…" and you make little solutions for yourself as you go along. And that’s really what you are sculpting for yourself when you write narrative. (2005: 8) Playfulness, inwardness, complexity, emotion and opacity are necessary means of reaching rationality, openness, simplicity, and clarity. Admittedly, this is still not a theory, but it represents movement toward one. Through the concept of communication, peace education, as a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary endeavor, encounters the term truth from the realization that there is none. There is no single truth. There are only many truths. But the search for truth bears in its nature the values that might carry seeds for peace education. Truth is in the search, not in the finding. One cannot confine teaching to the simple and boring erudition of facts, and one can by no means begin to believe that a rendering of facts outside of their context has anything to do with searching for truth. As soon as we in education begin to contextualize, we invoke some element or other of drama, of rhetorical persuasion, attempts to convince, and ways of con- veying worldviews to our students.

1. Kramer, Mark (2005) "Why narrative now? A tense but unhealthy marriage", Narrative Journalism South Africa, Johannesburg: Paula Fray & Associates.

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As though that were not enough, the lines keep getting blurred between the kind of drama we encounter in reality and the kind we encounter in fiction. As Nobel Literature Laureate Harold Pinter stated in his 2005 Nobel Lecture, truth in drama is forever elusive:

You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. The truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. (2005, 1)1 From this point on, Pinter moves into a quite direct commentary on US policies towards Saddam Hussein and Iraq that took many listeners and viewers by surprise when he gave his lecture in 2005. Truth in political language is not elusive, but rather is sacrificed in the service of power:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. (2005: 3) The point is clear: on the one hand, art searches for truth and, on the other hand, politics avoid it. There is drama involved in both instances, but they are different kinds of drama. From the point of view of the dramatist seeking truth, we as the audience work with the author/narrator empathetically. We trust in the endeavor, we let it guide us. The alternative is to do the opposite: for instance in political communication where you recognize that the truth is to be found not in the light that the author/narrator is providing you with – but in the darkness beyond, where you are not supposed to go. Education – as journalism – has a possibility to choose either mode of communication. But one only can approximate Kramer’s concept of contact. Narrative education must engage, and it can employ artful ways of seeking the truth, but it can’t lie or deceive. As always, there will be struggles with the form, with the construction of conventional ways of saying and doing things. As Pinter says, sometimes the mirror has to be smashed in order to arrive at the truth behind the image staring back at you (2005: 12). But that is what engaging with narrative is all about, and we see immediately that this understanding of narrative has nothing in common with postmodernist thinking – it is strictly modern, and for an institution like Stiftelsen Arkivet, it has to be. Accepting the existence of multiple truths is far from saying that no truth exists.

Stiftelsen Arkivet as a venue for peace education Here I will leave the juxtaposition of peace education and peace journalism and return to the questions set forth in the beginning of this article. How does the above discussion serve to characterize Stiftelsen Arkivet as a peace education venue? How should we appraise its narrative method? How should we regard its form of contact education? Below I will try to answer by defining six general dimensions of peace education, hoping to underline the relevance of what is being achieved in Kristiansand.

Peace education requires engaging social narrative The first element of the framework concerns the notion of societal narrative2: and by that I simply mean a story that en- compasses an idea. Peace education courses and programs may not need a distinct social narrative of their own, but a peace education venue – like the one elaborated in this article – does. A key to understanding the social narrative at Stif- telsen Arkivet is the manner in which the house evokes collective memories of WW II. It is far from the whole story, but this is the regional context and a unique source. Understood as meta-narrative, there is little difference between the Arkivet story and the Robben Island story. The contexts are not the same, nor can political geography be compared. So what, then, explains the similarity, other than the social narrative that gives the physical place its cultural space? The house occupies about 7200 square feet, with ca. two-foot thick concrete walls. As a regional records archive, the building was built to last and to keep paper dry. Although not planned that way, the thickness of the walls was a convenient asset for the local Gestapo leaders, who soon after moving into the house began to use the basement as a prison and a

1. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates (downloaded September, 2007). 2. In this article, I confine the theoretical discussion of the term narrative to Kramer’s idea of narrative journalism. Cf. also Tveiten & Nohrstedt (2002). For a discussion of social narrative, see Lakoff (2006): Simple framing: An introduction to framing and its uses in politics, here quoted from Marianne H. Perez (2006). Lakoff’s article last updated in October 2006, my download Octo- ber 2007. http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing

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site for interrogation. Passersby would comment that there was a radio playing there during late hours. Only later would they realize that the music was meant to drown out the cries of prisoners being tortured. The name "House of Terror" began to stick to the house. Stories such as these are inseparable from the building. They are the meaning of the place itself. However, it has not always been that way, other than for those who experienced WW II in this region. As the vision to reclaim the building took hold in the late 1990’s, WW II veterans began to mobilize a volunteer work force. A friendship association was organized. They began to renovate the house, using national and municipal financing. Volunteers recreated the basement by calling for wartime artifacts to be returned from years of private storage. Thus, radios, guns, uniforms, pictures and a wide range of items became the property of Stiftelsen Arkivet. Posters, photographs, newspaper pages, torture implements and wedding dresses sewn from parachute silk were among the items. Local warehouses donated mate- rials for window installations. Window exhibition models from downtown storefronts now acquired familiar, more somber faces, clad in Gestapo uniforms, plastic arms raised to salute Der Führer, whose photo was re-hung on the wall of the former Gestapo office. The raw and echoing darkness of the basement was reenacted: recordings played German wartime music, recorded sounds of falling water drops from old pipes added to the oppressive atmosphere created by dimmed lam- plight. One irony is that the former office of regional Gestapo chief SS-Hauptstumführer Rudolf Kerner from 1941 until 1945 is now the office of the Stiftelsen Arkivet Friendship Association, the group of volunteers that to a large extent is the reason why the foundation exists at all. Some of the oldest members of the association were themselves imprisoned in the basement where the Gestapo office now has been restored, as close to the original as possible. In the friendship association’s office upstairs, there is a lot of smoking, coffee drinking and laughter, but painful memories are never far from the surface either. A brief illustration is in order: next to the friendship association’s office is the conference room where the already mentioned tapestry tells the regional occupation story from left to right. It begins in the beginning of the occupation and it tells it to the end. The guides who take visitors on tours of the building end their tours there. They now turn their attention to the "moral" of the narrative. Five decades of taboos and regional silence have ended – as in Pinter’s Nobel Prize address, the mirror has been smashed. And standing there, facing a tapestry that functions like what the ancient rhetors would call the dispositio stage of speechmaking, or narrative, the old veterans who tell the story have a template with which to do it. The tapestry structures the story, visualizes the elements and draws the audience into conclusio. Rationality, as we gradually come to realize, is an emotional affair. Thinking, speaking, and feeling are not opposites, but extensions of each other. Peace education has to begin with that fact and speak to the stories of the heart in order to be convincing. Unlike the classroom or the editorial office, to return to Kramer’s point of view, the narrative location at Arkivet inserts an experience into the equation: contact education.

Peace education and experienced authenticity Authenticity is the second element of the case analysis. What does that term mean, specifically in the Arkivet context? The narratives that students and other visitors encounter at Stiftelsen Arkivet have been written and rehearsed, but they are still oral and spontaneous. They are communal, dialogical, unpredictable, and subject to change by those who tell them. As one of my interviewees, a German student, said; it was exactly this homemade quality that made the exhibition so different from anything else he had encountered. The rawness was what made it trustworthy. And the lack of professional frameworks for the narrators made it all the more convincing. His reason for being in Kristiansand was simple enough: his grandfather had been a soldier in Norway for several years during WW II, before he was sent to the Eastern Front. Through- out his childhood, the student had heard stories of Norway. His grandfather had dreamed of emigrating there.1 Another student responded to the basement exhibition by fainting. Yet another, a 25-year old female from one of the Baltic countries, burst out in a fit of rage at the violence of the stories being told. In several long conversations afterwards, she told the same story as the German student: It was raw, hard, unpolished. It was impossible to just move beyond it. When she walked around in the basement listening to the sounds and taking in the imagery, she had a creeping sense of something bad – a sense, she added, that Norwegian students coming from a less violent past may not experience. She said she could not comprehend why anyone would embellish stories told in a basement like this with details of suffering that became even more stark when you stopped to think that they happened here, to them, or their relatives – she added.2 Many students approached me after classes to discuss their experience at Arkivet, but seldom ventured to do so in the public domain of the university classroom. For the purpose of this paper it is sufficient to say that their responses more often than not touched upon the issue of authenticity: the tangibility of a war fought long ago, when retold and re-enacted with the means put in place at Arkivet:3 The common reference in all the conversations is the role played by the storytellers.

1. Personal interview 2007. 2. Personal interview 2005.

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These are old men and women with varying capabilities for making a story come to life, but with a story capable of being told. Their English would not pass muster in a professional museum, but somehow that is not a matter of concern here. There is a will, a dedication, an oral quality and an idealistic precision that in and of itself is a condition of identification, it seems. My students are all more than 20 years old. I cannot tell whether younger school students, aged 14-16, would react in the same way.1 That remains for research to establish. Yet, some narrative experiences are decidedly not for teen-agers at all: a South African visitor, one of the more prominent members of the ANC and an inmate of Nelson Mandela’s at Robben Island, met my students and talked about his experiences at Robben Island. A tall, broad-shouldered man, he recounted how he had been tortured numerous times by being placed underneath a tin pan from which water dripped onto his head, for hours at a time. Drops fell every 10 seconds, striking his shaved head. Initially, it had been more like a joke, he said. But after 20 minutes, the drops started to reverberate in his skull, and after hours the sheer anticipation of the next drop became unbearable. He told the students that he had come to Kristiansand the day before. After a meeting with local government officials, he had been taken down into the museum of venue. And at the sound of the reverberating water pipes in the basement he broke down and wept.

War memory joined to humanitarian ideology The third aspect of this case framework is the tension involved in combining war memory with the practical work of humanitarian organizations. The humanitarian interest behind such places as Robben Island Heritage Museum and Stiftelsen Arkivet is quite easy to spot, but there is, on the other hand, a great variety of humanitarian organizations and organiza- tional cultures that fall within the category. Amongst them we find peace movements – often of a kind that caters very little to people and sentiments from a military background. Yet another category of peace organizations does exactly the opposite – indeed, some would treat national armed forces as peace organizations as well. NGOs of all kinds may be natural co- partners with war documentation centers and peace education centers alike. However, a key issue is how compatible a peace education epistemology is with the folk narrative of war memories? It may be entirely compatible, and then again it might not. In either case the issue remains central to an NGO-based peace educational facility. During the first years of the foundation, conflict tension ran high between those who favored an emphasis on WW II and those who thought there was too much of it, at the cost of an emphasis on transforming contemporary conflict situations. At the time when the first website was created in 2003, there were many discussions about the logo (a line drawing of the house), the chosen colors (faded olive green – symbolizing both military colors and the color of earth and growth in Greek mythology), the use of photos, and so on.2 The humanitarian organizations located on the second and third floors of the building had strong opinions about the lack of emphasis on peace issues. These were opinions that reverberated throughout the city, giving the foundation an immediate and important challenge to improve its reputation. Contrary to its vision, Stif- telsen Arkivet became known as a site of conflict rather than a messenger of peace. There is a profound issue at play here. Throughout the world, wherever such documentation centers as Stiftelsen Arkivet have been established, there is the challenge of acquiring something more than a museum-like venue. Museums tend to freeze history and render narratives as standardized messages. Museums and other exhibition venues are constantly faced with the challenge of keeping up with their publics. The past only provides interesting exhibition material if someone comes to see it. Provided that the audience in fact does come, one can take one of two courses. Either one can pay homage to the past, focus on it and distill its essence once and for all with the aim of canonizing certain ways of looking at things, or one can attempt to rearrange, reconstruct and reconnect the dots on the map, creating new lines. As anyone with experience in communicating art to the public will know, such attempts at reconfiguring the past will usually be met with accusations from some and enthusiasm from others. Any effort that "creates new meaning" for some people "messes up tradition" for others. And needless to say, the analogy holds true for peace education, as well. In our collective dealing with WW II, there is obviously an intergenerational gap: old and young people tend to have rather different conceptions of that war. A striking feature of the peace education work at Stiftelsen Arkivet is the kind of contact that has been established between generations and NGO-types. One could not at the outset have foreseen that school students and employees in humanitarian organizations – far removed from WW II – would at all partake in the vision once enabled by war veterans. But it happened. It turned out to be a version of their own visions.

3. A note should be made here that I am basing these renderings on long conversations carried out over the course of three years. In this paper I make no endeavor to discuss methods, however. My principal concern is the reflection on peace education, in light of peace journalism and narrative strategies employed in both cases. 1. A point stressed in a number of informal conversations. 2. Personal notes.

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Folk stories joined to academic epistemologies of war and peace The fourth aspect is the difference in the epistemology of war and peace as folk material, on the one hand, and as academic material, on the other. For instance, the vividness of memories and personal commitments is a particularly salient feature in the case of Stiftelsen Arkivet and its establishment. The tapestry adorning the conference room wall could only have been woven by someone with a personal attachment to the story. The bloody prisoners lying handcuffed on the concrete floor in the basement are only real through a stretch of the imagination – and that imagination has little to do with academic insights, much more with folk stories and dramatizations. The stories that are being told do not require academic insights at all, nor were they primarily researched by historians. They stem from the depths of local trauma, from several generations of subdued pain. Although they are old stories by now, in a country bearing every sign of a peaceful political and cultural system, they are stories that are not only alive, but in a sense have been lying dormant only waiting for the right occasion to reemerge and reclaim a more public identity – they are stories of humiliation and dignity and refer to common human experience as an ingredient in peace education. It is the challenge of academia to construct its own narrative in that context, according to peace researcher and psychologist Evelyn G. Lindener (2007). She may be right at that, but we are in a sense also approaching a reorientation back towards a kind of philosophical anthropology that is not new at all but in fact mainstream. Academic activity and the more structured education flowing from it come into the picture in at least four different ways. First, there are the factual ac- counts presented with historical precision: what happened, where did it happen, and whom did it involve? Second, there is the comparative dimension, involving the contrasts and similarities between WW II in southern Norway, WW II in other parts of Norway and the world, and also other conflicts in the past and present. This comparative aspect is followed by a hermeneutic aspect: what does it mean? What can we learn? A hermeneutic aspect is followed by an even more philosophical and normative aspect: what are we supposed to learn? How does the WW II experience in southern Norway speak to us as human beings, in a more generalized narrative than that which concerns the local place and time? Questions such as these are not the sole domain of academia, of course. However, from academia one might gain the precision and the modesty that is necessary when shifting between the general and the particular in sharing WW II memories. In the particular case of Stiftelsen Arkivet, one is struck by the strength and vigor of the folk story, the latent knowledge that keeps manifesting itself, the interplay between everyday historians and professional academic historians, as well as the difficulty that arises when more profound and less concrete research issues come on the agenda. How does one mobilize popular interest for a type of war and peace research that requires years of specialist training in order to even begin to understand? On the one hand, a good communicator can quite clearly lecture on the models of society that war and peace researchers employ. But how can such insights be joined to folk insight as something else and something more than lecturing – as contact education?

Fusion of direct and indirect communication The fifth aspect concerns the interplay of old and new media technologies. As demonstrated already, there is a strong element of folk wisdom and folklore at Stiftelsen Arkivet. This description is not meant in any derogatory sense, but rather as a positive description of the lubricant that helps the wheels turn smoothly. The strong oral culture is of particular interest when attempting to generalize on the experiences at Stiftelsen Arkivet as a venue for communication. And we remember Carey citing Dewey: communication is a wonderful thing. But however wonderful, it still represents the difficulty of putting reality into technological machines and still having it come out resembling something real at the other end. There is no substitute for human, direct narration, not even in our times, when we have storytelling machines so sophisticated that we could not even imagine them ten years ago. There is always a rupture when the human modality of storytelling is ex- changed for a technological one. There is the particular image of a retired air force officer (a paratrooper from the special forces) standing in front of a group of 14 year-old school kids and telling them about a local quisling during WW II who became a tormentor of friends and neighbors brought to Arkivet. The veteran soldier has a personal contact point to this story: right outside is a statue with the torso of his father, the local leader of the resistance movement – who was brought to Oslo and shot.1 Like the narrative in the tapestry upstairs, the narrative in the basement exhibition more or less tells itself. But it cannot on its own add the nuances of a story once lived. And the 14-year-olds know it, as do my own students. The question then is how to preserve the oral dimension of the documentation center when there are no longer any people left to tell it who also lived it? There will come a day when a more standardized kind of narrative will pave its inevitable way at Arkivet, just as it has in

1. For an English version of the Arkivet story on Major Arne Laudal, follow this link: http://www.stiftelsen-arkivet.no/arne_laudals_story.

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other places and contexts. To an extent, that day has already materialized. Several interactive media games have been created in order to provide a further geographical reach and temporal longevity for the Arkivet experience. A new website also structures the center and adds new functions, like downloadable photographs, search modes, news updates, as well as links to like-minded centers nationwide and internationally. On a more encompassing platform, a multimedia service called Never Again offers downloadable films, charts, audio interviews, statistics, and literature with information provided in three languages (Norwegian, English, German).1 Although this is for another article to elaborate on, it seems clear that the very issue itself is of growing importance, not just to the website service Never Again or Stiftelsen Arkivet as such, but in a generalized sense: 1) how does one account for the vividness of life and lived experience being told by war witnesses, when the mode of communication is indirect and not direct – when the eyewitness tells his or her story to a tape, and not just to another person – without a tape or a video- camera? 2) Exactly how ought one to go about making the context of the tape being played to an audience come alive in the right kind of context? 3) And, finally: do eyewitnesses truly remember their stories, or do they also reconstruct them in the process of articulating their memories? Does the setting of the interview and the technologies applied also influence on the end product – the story they tell? In short, the vista of research questions opened up here is truly broad. I make no claims to the contrary. I rather emphasize that it makes sense to raise such questions here, in this context, and with this orientation. Stiftelsen Arkivet is in a sense part of a large, encompassing, and international phenomenon whose core is the question of how social memory is captured and communicated. This is possibly also the area where concerns with peace education cross into concerns with peace journalism. If one starts with the wide definition of journalism as a social narrative of crucial facts and events, then there are more than coincidental overlaps between education and journalism. In the slow contextualization and narrative rendering of what events actually mean, journalism crosses back into education. Multi-modal communication is how peace journalists express their ideals, although they remain within the context of news journalism. ‘Contactful journalism’ in the manner in which Kramer defined it, is perhaps not an option for the news media. If not, then quite obviously there are a number of other options within the print and broadcast media as we know them. But even more interestingly, peace journalism may hold the most promise as a multi-modal form of journalism in completely different kinds of venues – as for instance NGOs like Open Democracy2 or for that matter Stiftelsen Arkivet. In the future, it may be a kind of peace reporting that one will find more in think tanks, NGO websites and other venues than in the regular media, where the journalistic way of approaching the world is fast becoming a standardized and alienating mode of operation, making permeable the very center of what normatively is referred to as news (Tveiten, 2006). New technologies hold many promises, especially for NGO venues with a sufficient reputation to actually begin to expand into what was once the realm of the news media. Likewise, one finds, for instance, BBC World coming out with a continuously updated website approaching much of the same value system as that propagated in peace education and multi-modal peace journalism. Technology blurs the genres.

Contact education requires spaces for active silence The sixth case aspect addresses the context of communication, noting that it is of interest when 100 undergraduate students in political communication remain completely still for a full day. That is what happens when I bring my students there. I was not aware of that possibility years ago when I began to construct the website. Silence is a key element in contact education, however. Silence is not necessarily the same as the absence of speech and sound, nor is it necessarily the same as passing by a monument in a city square and then hastening on without a word even to yourself. Silence as an active, collective version – as in mourning, or in shared awe – paradoxically also in forms of joy and tribute. It is a way of "working through," to paraphrase John Ellis (1992). The quietness of students at Arkivet is profound, in their listening to old voices and hearing history being told in a different way. Measured against the distanced passivity with which most of us today receive our daily news, such interest is just that: it is interesting. Informal class surveys tell me that these are students who seldom read newspapers unless asked to. Their habits concerning television news are completely different from mine. Their technologies of communication are more mobile, less standardized, less oriented to the classical institutions of news and more to the ironic treatment of daily hap- penings in talk shows and satirical programs. But here they sit still, not because their intellects are touched – rather because their emotions are touched. And that is why I am thinking that educators and journalists need to take a serious look in the rear view mirror in order to see whether the road still stretches all the way back to the founding pioneers of both journalism and education as a holistic and political narrative with an appeal to head and heart.

1. This is the website for the multi-modal database: www.neveragain.no 2. www.opendemocracy.org

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What conclusions we draw from such inconclusive case material as the above depends a great deal on where we plan to go with our ideas of peace education – which in turn is a question of where we are coming from. Have we read the classics that we refer to, in journalism teaching, for instance? Do we really know, or do we continue to quote Walter Lippmann when we perhaps should be quoting John Dewey? Was there not something about a political and cultural canon – a value system – in the Lippmann equation (Tveiten, 2006)?1 Yes there was, and in his writing, from Public Opinion in 1922 to The Public Philosophy in 1955, it became even more clearly articulated. Lippmann kept reiterating his early Platonic insights into how we as human beings require modes of simplification in order to make sense of the world. On the other hand, where Lippmann seems to have doubted the popular capacity to sift through complexity and arrive at simplicity, Dewey seems to have taken the opposite turn – beginning with simplicity, confident that the pubic can handle complexity. The key element in understanding the paradoxes of the Stiftelsen Arkivet phenomenon is not a criticism of news journalism or traditional educational institutions. It is rather the idea that all societies at all times require locations for dealing with collective narratives, social memories and traumas caused by conflict. The Arkivet house is an example of such a space in the physical sense. There is also a metaphysical concept of space: space in our heads, in our stories and in our academic curricula to let the stories begin to tell themselves – letting them form structures, and not always forcing them into pre- defined ones. There is a very wide range and a great number of degrees when it comes to putting that idea to work. We see it immediately when we juxtapose the trials in Cambodia or South Africa with the more mundane narratives in peaceful Kristiansand. On the other hand, if the case is that so much energy was unleashed in a reclaiming of wartime memory in peaceful Kristiansand, all the more reason to pay attention to it as a workable narrative strategy elsewhere where conflicts are vastly more entrenched. If it requires 50 years of prosperity in Norway to begin to scratch beneath the surface of a war memory, what does that say of the role and potential of communication in peace building elsewhere?2

Summary In the above I have outlined a way of understanding the emergence of Stiftelsen Arkivet, with a view to also contributing to a more generalized debate on peace education as a field. No emphasis has been placed on like-minded institutions in Norway – of which there are a number. Little emphasis has been devoted to kindred institutions in other countries, of which there are very many. And the literature review has remained at a basic level, simply because these elements are not the key elements of this study.3 Rather, the most ambitious theoretical ideas are Carey’s remark that "communication is a wonderful thing" and Boulding’s contention that the word "peace" is one of the most difficult words to communicate in the English language. Placing Stiftelsen Arkivet into this context, I have tried to show how the main element in the vision behind Stiftelsen Arkivet was – and is – to create a location at which the local occupation history from 1940 to 1945 could be attached to contemporary conflict transformation issues. The strategy was to approach this goal by inviting humanitarian organizations to rent the remaining office space in the building once it was acquired. Hence, what began as a small-scale enterprise in 2001, based for the most part on volunteer work, was transformed in a few years into a professionally run documentation center with a conscious and ambitious plan to strengthen its vision by arousing the interest of key decision-makers in Norwegian cultural politics, foreign policy, and educational policy. Emerging from these formulations is an understanding that peace education, despite the heterogeneity of peace research and peace building, may learn something from Stiftelsen Arkivet’s and like-minded institutions’ ways of pursuing actual spaces and places for contemplation and collective storytelling. Stiftelsen Arkivet is not a school and does not teach in the traditional sense. On the contrary, it is used by scholars and educators like myself as a venue for what I have called "contact education." It is a powerful idea: Stiftelsen Arkivet represents a ‘contactful’ space where collectively told stories are worked through in collectively engaged silence, often with a high level of engagement. What marks it as an innovative mode of peace education is perhaps the attempt to fill old places with new meaning, old meaning with new relevance, stories and smashed mirrors – attempts to get rid of the mirror images of wartime that stare back at you, move to the same side as you do when you move, and never let you pass by when you try to.

References

Boulding, Kenneth E. (1965) The Meaning of the 20th Century, New York: Harper Colophon Books.

Boulding, Kenneth E. (1978) Stable Peace, Austin: Texas University Press.

1. Cf. for instance Chomsky and Herman’s (1988) reference to Lippmann in their book and title: Manufacturing Consent: The Polit- ical Economy of the Media. 2. Indeed, literature is being published that is beginning to take this approach, but that is for another review to elaborate on. 3. Rather, I refer to a forthcoming book that also includes student essays from Arkivet, to be published in 2008.

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Brock-Utne (2004) Peace education in an era of globalization, published by Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future research, downloaded from http://www.transnational.org, October, 2007.

Chomsky, Noam and Edward Herman (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Media, Boston: South End Press. Ellis, John (1992) Visible Fictions, London: Routledge.

Galtung, Johan & Marilyn Langlois (2006) Partnership, not dominance: Voice of another America, downloaded from www.transcend.org_databases/articles September 2007. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Culture, New York; Basic Books.

Keane, John (1998) Civil Society Old Images New Visions, London: Polity Press.

Keane, John (2003) Global Civil Society? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kent, George (1977) "Peace education: Pedagogy of the middle class, in Peace and Change, Vol 4. No. 3, fall issue.

Kramer, Mark (2005) "Why narrative now? A tense but unhealthy marriage", Narrative Journalism South Africa, Johannesburg: Paula Fray & Associates. Lakoff, George (2006) Simple framing, An introduction to framing and its uses in politics: http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing

Lindner, Evelin Gerda (2007) "In times of globalization and human rights: does humiliation become the most disruptive force?", Journal of human dignity and humiliation studies, downloaded from http://www.transnational.org, October, 2007.

Lippmann, Walter (1922) Public Opinion, London: Free Press

Lippmann, Walter (1955) The Public Philosophy, New York: The New American Library. Lynch, Jake (2007) "A course in peace journalism", Conflict and Communication Online, Vol. 6, No. 1.

Perez, Marianne H. (2006) Moving mainstream media towards a culture of peace, MA thesis submitted to the European University Center for Peace Studies, Stadtschlaining, Austria, May, 2006.

Pinter, Harold (2005) "Art, truth & politics – Nobel Lecture", downloaded from www.Nobeloprize.org, downloaded September, 2007.

Seligman, Adam B. (1992) The Idea of a Civil Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press . Splichal, Slavko (1999) Public Opinion. Developments and controversies in the 20th century, London: Rowman and Littlefield.

Tveiten, Oddgeir (2006) Nødvendige nyheter, Kristiiansand: IJ Forlaget/Norwegian Academic Press.

Tveiten, Oddgeir & Stig Arne Nohrstedt (2002) "Discourse, rhetoric and propaganda: Conflict journalism from a multumethodological approach", in Luostarinen, Heikki and Wilhelm Kempf (eds.) Journalism and the New World Order. Vol. II. Studying war and the media, Gothenburg: Nordicom Press.

About the author: Oddgeir Tveiten is Associate Professor of Political Communication at the University of Agder in Southern Norway. He holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Communication, Stanford University, where he is writing a book on global journalism. His most recent book, published in Norwegian, deals with political communication and is scheduled to appear in November 2008. eMail: [email protected]

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conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Wilhelm Kempf Die Wirkung politischer Nachrichten auf die Einschätzung des israelisch- palästinensischen Konfliktes seitens deutscher Studenten

Unter Anwendung des experimentellen Designs einer Studie von Peleg & Alimi (2005) wird untersucht, wie unterschiedlich geframte Berichte über die Zustimmung der Knesset zur israelisch-palästinensischen "Road Map" die Beurteilung des Nahostkonfliktes seitens deutscher Studenten beeinflussen.

Die Ergebnisse der Studie bestätigen unsere theoretische Annahme, wonach der Effekt von Informationen, die in politischen Nachrichten präsentiert werden, über die Einschätzung der explizit angesprochenen Themen hinausreicht und auch die Einschätzung anderer Themen berührt, die über die Struktur der mentalen Modelle damit verbunden sind, in welche die Rezipienten die Information integrieren. Entsprechend ist der Einfluss politischer Nachrichten auch nicht einheitlich, sondern er hängt von den mentalen Modellen ab, welche die Rezipienten bereits zuvor entwickelt haben. Diese a priori Modelle können deshalb stärkere Prädiktoren für Medieneffekte darstellen als Variablen wie die politische Orientierung der Rezipienten, ihre persönlichen Ansichten oder die Relevanz, welche sie dem Konflikt zuschreiben.

Volltext (in Englisch)

Zum Autor: Wilhelm Kempf, seit 1977 Professor für Psychologische Methodenlehre und Leiter der Projektgruppe Friedensforschung an der Universität Konstanz. Seit 2002 Herausgeber von conflict & communication online. Arbeitsschwerpunkte: Gewaltfreie Konfliktlösungen, Konstruktion sozialer Wirklichkeit durch die Massenmedien. Veröffentlichungen u.a.: Konflikt und Gewalt (Münster: agenda, 2000); Los Medios y la Cultura de Paz (mit Sonia Gutiérrez Villalobos, Berlin: regener, 2001); Journalism and the New World Order. Vol. II. Studying War and the Media(mit Heikki Luostarinen, Göteborg: Nordicom, 2002); Constructive Conflict Coverage (herausgegeben vom Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Berlin: regener, 2003).

Adresse: Fachbereich Psychologie, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz. Website: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/SozWiss/fg-psy/ag-meth/ eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Wilhelm Kempf The impact of political news on German students' assessments of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict

Employing the design of a prior experiment by Peleg & Alimi (2005), the present study examines how differently framed texts about the Knesset's approval of the Israeli-Palestinian 'Road Map' influence German students' assessments of the

Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The results of the study confirmed our theoretical hypothesis that information presented in political news reports influences more than just recipients' assessments of the specifically mentioned issues. In addition, it also affects their assessments of issues related only via the structures of the mental models into which they integrate information. Moreover, the influence of political news is not uniform, but rather varies with differences in the mental models recipients have previously formed. These a priori mental models, therefore, can be more powerful predictors of media effects than variables such as recipients' political orientations, their personal views or the relevance they attribute to a conflict.

full text (in English)

On the author: Wilhelm Kempf, since 1977 Professor for Psychological Methodology and Head of the Peace Research Group at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Since 2002 editor of conflict & communication online. Special areas of interest: nonviolent conflict solutions, the construction of social reality by the mass media. Recent books: Konflikt und Gewalt (Münster: agenda, 2000); Los Medios y la Cultura de Paz (with Sonia Gutiérrez Villalobos, Berlin: regener, 2001); Journalism and the New World Order. Vol. II. Studying War and the Media (with Heikki Luostarinen, Göteborg: Nordicom, 2002); Constructive Conflict Coverage (edited by the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution: Berlin: regener, 2003).

Address: Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany. Website: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/SozWiss/fg-psy/ag-meth/ eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Wilhelm Kempf The impact of political news on German students’ assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Kurzfassung: Unter Anwendung des experimentellen Designs einer Studie von Peleg & Alimi (2005) wird untersucht, wie unterschiedlich geframte Berichte über die Zustimmung der Knesset zur israelisch-palästinensischen "Road Map" die Beurteilung des Nahostkonfliktes seitens deutscher Studenten beeinflussen. Die Ergebnisse der Studie bestätigen unsere theoretische Annahme, wonach der Effekt von Informationen, die in politischen Nachrichten präsentiert werden, über die Einschätzung der explizit angesprochenen Themen hinausreicht und auch die Einschätzung anderer Themen berührt, die über die Struktur der mentalen Modelle damit verbunden sind, in welche die Rezipienten die Information integrieren. Entspre- chend ist der Einfluss politischer Nachrichten auch nicht einheitlich, sondern er hängt von den mentalen Modellen ab, welche die Rezipi- enten bereits zuvor entwickelt haben. Diese a priori Modelle können deshalb stärkere Prädiktoren für Medieneffekte darstellen als Variablen wie die politische Orientierung der Rezipienten, ihre persönlichen Ansichten oder die Relevanz, welche sie dem Konflikt zuschreiben

Abstract: Employing the design of a prior experiment by Peleg & Alimi (2005), the present study examines how differently framed texts about the Knesset's approval of the Israeli-Palestinian 'Road Map' influence German students' assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The results of the study confirmed our theoretical hypothesis that information presented in political news reports influences more than just recipients' assessments of the specifically mentioned issues. In addition, it also affects their assessments of issues related only via the structures of the mental models into which they integrate information. Moreover, the influence of political news is not uniform, but rather varies with differences in the mental models recipients have previously formed. These a priori mental models, therefore, can be more powerful predictors of media effects than variables such as recipients' political orientations, their personal views or the relevance they attribute to a conflict.

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1. Introduction That the media are capable of influencing public opinion was recognized very early in media history, and the history of propaganda is as old as the history of the press. Nonetheless, there is still no agreement as to whether or not media can exert influence, and if they can, in what ways. While early empirical studies attributed great influencing power to the media (Lasswell, 1927), later studies portrayed the media as exerting little influence on recipients’ views (Klapper, 1960). In the meantime, a consensus has arisen that mass media and their audiences interactively affect each other in a wide variety of ways (Früh & Schönbach, 1982). After more than seventy years of media effects research, there is a strong trend to not attribute media effects solely to the facts reported in the media, but rather to assume that there are various ways that media can influence public social constructions of reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1969). In this process, media serve not only as mediators, but also as constructors of social realities (Tuchman, 1978; Cohen & Wolfsfeld, 1993). News reports merely provide raw material for recipients’ reality constructions. Presented in de- and re-contextualized form, they reflect the reporters’ reality constructions. Through cognitive processing by recipients, these constructions are then integrated into recipients’ subjective realities. To maintain their cognitive balance (Heider, 1946, 1958; Festinger, 1957), people accept parts of offered reality constructions, while they discount, suppress and/or reject others. With regard to conflict coverage, this process is affected by a number of interrelated factors.

1.1 Level of conflict escalation One of these factors is the level of conflict escalation, which progresses from self-centered divergence of perspectives via competition to struggle and climaxes in open warfare (Glasl, 1992). Inter-group conflict strengthens intra-group solidarity. Group members can thereby hope to increase their social status by taking a strong stance in opposing the enemy. Group members tend to identify more strongly with their own group and its positions, and the more escalated the conflict, the more strongly they do so.

Thus Blake & Mouton (1961, 1962) already showed that group competition encourages increased solidarity within groups, greater group identification and a shift toward conflict-oriented leadership. At the same time, competition encourages people to increasingly see the other group as unlike themselves and stimulates an increase in blanket negative judgments of the others. Where group competition is high, negotiations to resolve conflict are characterized by (1) a tendency to overrate proposals by one’s own group and to reject those of the opponent, (2) a tendency to mutual misunderstandings, whereby shared values are ignored and differences overemphasized, (3) a tendency to focus more on gaining advantages than on making progress toward agreement, so that negotiating partners who display a willingness to compromise are treated as disloyal, and inflexible negotiating partners are admired as brilliant statesmen, (4) a tendency to discount neutral third parties whose recommendations would not benefit one’s group, as well as (5) a tendency to frequently block negotiations instead of trying to develop proposals satisfactory to both sides. In experimental psychological negotiation research these findings have very frequently been confirmed, fine-tuned and differentiated. Conflict parties tend toward the mistaken assumption that their interests are incompatible with their opponents’ (Thompson & Hastie, 1990; Thompson & Hrebec, 1996). Negative framing of a conflict situation reduces the willingness of conflict parties to compromise (Bazerman et al., 1985; Bottom & Studt 1993; Lim & Carnevale, 1995; De Dreu & McCusker, 1997; Olekalns, 1997), and because conflict parties are obsessed with their relative gains and losses, they pass up opportunities to end their conflict to the advantage of both sides (Bazerman et al. 1985; Thompson & Hastie, 1990; Thompson & DeHar- pport, 1994; Fukuno & Ohbuchi, 1997). Conflict parties tend to overestimate the probability of their winning a conflict settlement more favorable to themselves (Bazerman & Neale, 1982; Kramer et al., 1993; Lim, 1997; Bazerman et al., 1999) and are likely to persist in following a confrontational conflict strategy even when a cooperative strategy would be more advantageous to both sides (Bazerman & Neale, 1983; Bizman & Hoffman, 1993; Keltner & Robinson, 1993; Bazerman, 1998; Diekmann et al., 1999). The opponent’s perspective is typically disregarded (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985; Bazerman & Carrol, 1987; Carrol et al., 1988; Valley et al., 1998) and his concessions minimized (Ross & Stillinger, 1991; Curhan et al., 1998). Facts that strengthen one’s own position are usually the ones remembered more vividly (Thompson & Loewenstein, 1992), and ethical standards for the evaluation of conflict behavior are subordinated to group interests (Messick & Sentis, 1979; Babcock & Olson, 1992; De Dreu, 1996; Dieckmann, 1997; Diekmann et al., 1997). Conflict parties often consider themselves as more just than the other side (Tenbrunsel,1998) and defend the use of unethical tactics as necessitated by the threat to their very survival (Shapiro, 1991). They tend to overestimate their own success chances and attribute any failures to the opponent’s unfairness (Kramer, 1994). Ideological differences are overestimated, and the opponent’s views are perceived as more extreme than they really

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are (Robinson & Keltner, 1997). Even the mere attempt to reach a negotiated settlement is rejected as unethical as soon as hallowed values seem threatened (Tetlock et al., 1996). Asymmetric conceptualizations of a conflict situation begin to coalesce after even just a little interaction (Thompson & Hast- ie, 1990; Pinkley, 1990; Messick, 1999) in a collective script with "interlocking roles" (Pruitt & Carnevale, 1993), and this creates a social reality that seemingly confirms conflict parties’ expectations. Conflict parties treat their assessment of the opponent as obviously true, and opponents’ reactions seem to confirm this.

1.2 Mental models and societal beliefs Although rarely mentioned in the most recent negotiation research, a theoretical perspective that can integrate these findings was already offered by Deutsch (1973). Based on his understanding that people do not react to the (objective) prop- erties of things in their environment per se, but rather to the (subjective) meanings they attribute to them (Blumer, 1973), Deutsch saw that conflict escalation and the accompanying group processes are not inevitable, but rather result from the cognitive-emotional framework within which conflict is interpreted. According to Deutsch’s theory, which has gained great influence in the field of conflict management (cf. Fisher & Brown, 1989; Glasl, 1992), conflict is open to interpretation as either a competitive or a cooperative process, depending on whether it is respectively framed within a win-lose or a win- win model. Although Deutsch himself doesn’t yet use the term mental model, he regards this interpretive framework and the resulting misperceptions as the motors of conflict escalation and de-escalation. Combining Deutsch’s theoretical approach with Glasl’s escalation model (1992), Kempf (1996, 2002a) has developed a typology of mental conflict models which describes them in terms of the dimensions of (a) the conceptualization of conflict as a win-win, win-lose or lose-lose process, (b) the assessment of parties’ rights and aims, (c) the evaluation of their actions and behavior, and (d) the emotional consequences of these interpretations, which ultimately transform outrage at war into outrage at the enemy. Translating this typology into content analytical methodologies (Kempf, Reimann & Luostarinen, 1996; Bläsi, Jaeger, Kempf & Möckel, 2004), Kempf’s cognitive escalation/de-escalation model has been confirmed by numerous cross-national studies of media coverage during the Gulf War (Kempf & Reimann, 2002), the post-Yugoslavian civil wars (Bosnia, Kosovo and the aftermath) (Kempf, 2002b; Sabellek, 2001; Jaeger & Möckel, 2004; Annabring & Jäger 2005a; Bläsi, Jaeger, Kempf, Kon- dopoulou & Paskoski, 2005), German-French relations after World War II (Jaeger, 2005) and the German-French conflict over the presidency of the European Central Bank (Plontz, 2006). Based on these findings, finally, the influence of escalation- vs. de-escalation oriented media frames on recipients’ assessments of reported events has been investigated in experimental studies by Annabring, Ditlmann & Kempf (2005), Kempf (2005), Schaefer (2006) and Spohrs (2006). Summarizing the results, it can be said that (a) journalists tend to frame conflict reports using the same types of mental models that predominate in the respective society and/or conform with its political agenda. (b) Journalists adapt the mental models with which they interpret conflict to changing political conditions and, in turn, (c) the escalation vs. de-escalation oriented framing of conflict coverage affects the public assessment of conflict in the same direction. According to Entman’s (1993, 52) definition: "To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described." When it comes to framing effects, however, the literature portrays a rather complex range of possibilities (cf. Tuchman, 1978; Entman, 1993; Nelson et al., 1997; Scheufele, 1999; Druckman, 2001). Although there is still disagreement on the precise action mechanisms, and although conceptual differences make it hard to achieve a unified theory, a few main tendencies can nevertheless be identified. Not everyone reacts to a given frame in the same way, and the offered frames are not simply adopted by recipients, but rather are judged in terms of their presuppositions, the perceived trustworthiness of the source and/or the availability of alternative frames. With respect to conflict coverage, it can also be assumed that the effects of news and its framing depend on audience involvement in a conflict, which will be greater the more the public is outraged by enemy atrocities and the more it feels committed to one of the conflict parties in historical, political and cultural terms. The more it feels affected, the more an audience will tend to identify with one of the parties, and the more it will tend to interpret the conflict according to the mental model accepted by the party it favors. According to Bar-Tal (1996), it is especially likely that in long-term, intractable conflicts such mental models will harden into societal beliefs shared by (nearly) all members of a society, become part of the society’s ethos and contribute to society members’ sense of identity. Intractable conflicts impose heavy burdens, cause great psychological and social stress, and are painful, exhausting and costly, in both human and material terms. They force society to develop psychological mechanisms to facilitate successful coping, and societal beliefs fulfill an important role in creating these mechanisms.

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Since they are both part of a society’s ethos and a crucial factor in enduring the burdens of war, they tend to persist in post-war society, and, moreover, the transition from war to peace arouses increased feelings of insecurity in a new situation to which society members have not yet adjusted. Although in wartime countries try to create and maintain these beliefs by means of propaganda, they are not just an ideology imposed on society members by outsiders or their political leaders, nor do they merely result from deceptive propaganda. They arise from a long history of experiences with concrete conflicts at a high level of escalation and constitute themselves as a generalized interpretation of these conflicts. Once such beliefs have emerged in a society, they provide a framework that literally interprets every interaction with the opponent as still another episode in a grand historical drama where the "good" struggle against the forces of "evil." And once a conflict event has been interpreted in this way, it seemingly confirms the very stereotypes and prejudices that initially created this interpretation. The influence exerted by media coverage, in general (Hypothesis 1), and media frames, in particular (Hypothesis 2), on the public’s assessment of conflict can therefore be expected to be weaker the more the public has committed itself and the more societal beliefs have hardened. The effects of political news and its framing are not the same for all recipients (Hypothesis 3), however, but can be expected to correlate with recipients’ political views, their political knowledge, etc. (Hypotheses 4a–4d). If the effects of news coverage arise from an interpretive process where recipients integrate information into their mental model of a respective topic, it can be further expected that their a priori mental models will be even more powerful predictors (Hypothesis 5). We regard mental models as complex networks of elements balanced somewhat like iron filings in a magnetic field. Any change in the position of one of the elements will upset the balance, unless there are compensatory changes in the positions of all other elements. Consequently, it can be assumed that information integrated into recipients’ mental models not only affects their assessments of issues directly relevant to the information, but also their assessments of other issues related only via the structure of the model (Hypothesis 6).

2. Method 2.1 Experimental design This paper describes a pilot study for a forthcoming cross-cultural project based on the design of an experiment by Peleg & Alimi (2005). They showed that pro- vs. anti-Palestinian state framing of a news article about the Knesset’s approval of the Road Map influenced Israeli students’ assessments of whether or not they saw Palestinian territorial continuity as a threat to Israel. While the majority of participants who read a pro-state text were divided between "approval" and "approval/disapproval" of a statement claiming that continuity was non-threatening, the category "disapproval" dominated among participants who had read an anti-state text. Adopting the experimental design used by Peleg & Alimi, the experiment was structured in three phases: 1. Pre-test 2. Reading the text 3. Post-test The pre-test consisted of two questionnaires: 1.1 A general questionnaire requesting information such as the participants’ age, gender, citizenship and religion, as well as their political orientation and personal views, etc. 1.2 An attitude scale asking for the participants’ assessments of issues like whether the right of return was the crucial hurdle in resolving the conflict, or whether a comprehensive solution was preferable to an interim solution, etc. The text material consisted of three different versions of the same news article. 2.1 A non-framed (neutral) report about the Knesset’s approval of the Road Map. 2.2 A (pro-state) version of the same text framed by a headline and subheadings that underlined those contents of the following paragraphs, which argued for establishing a Palestinian state. 2.3 An (anti-state) version of the same text framed by a headline and subheadings that underlined those contents of the following paragraphs, which argued against establishing a Palestinian state. The post-test consisted of four instruments. 3.1 A memory test which asked the participants to repeat as literally as possible what they remembered from the text they had read.

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3.2 A categorization test asking the participants to group a number of issues mentioned in the text into meaningful categories. 3.3 A text assessment questionnaire asking the participants to indicate whether the events were reported accurately, etc. 3.4 An attitude scale asking for the participants’ assessments of issues like whether a moratorium on founding new set- tlements would improve the prospects for further negotiations and whether the vision of peace was realistic, etc. The text material and most of the pre- and post-test instruments were the same as in the Israeli study and are documented in Peleg & Alimi (2005). The general pre-test questionnaire was adapted to the German situation, and, in addition, the post- test text-assessment questionnaire, which dates back to a study by Bläsi et al. (2005), was not included in the original experiment.

2.2 Hypotheses The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of the experimental procedure on German readers’ assessments of the conflict and to test the following hypotheses: 1. The influence of a report about the Knesset’s approval of the Road Map on Israeli participants’ assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will also be found in a German sample. 2. The influence exerted by different media frames on Israeli participants’ assessments of the conflict will also be found in a German sample. 3. The influence of the reports will not be uniform. 4. The influence will depend on inter-subject factors such as: a. participants’ political orientations with respect to foreign policy (left vs. right), b. participants’ personal views in general (liberal vs. conservative), c. the relevance participants think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have for German foreign policy, d. participants’ self-estimated knowledge of the conflict, 5. but participants’ a priori mental models, into which reported information is integrated, will be even more powerful predictors. 6. The reports will affect more than just assessments of issues directly touched on by the information.

2.3 Operationalizations In order to test how the experimental procedure affected participants’ assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the present paper focuses on two issues. The first issue – whether Palestinian territorial continuity threatens Israel – is more or less directly relevant to the Road Map: For the Knesset to approve a peace plan leading to the creation of a Palestinian state, the threat must be calculable. In contrast, the second issue – whether or not the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is religious – is not directly relevant to approval of the Road Map, but is linked to it only via the structures of the recipients’ mental models, which may foresee better or worse chances of achieving a political settlement of the conflict. These two issues were included in both the pre-test and the post-test attitude scales and thus allow a direct measurement of the influence exerted by the experimental procedures on participants’ assessments. The exact wording of the respective statements in the two questionnaires is shown in Table 1.

Pre-test Post-test Religious conflict The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is religious in es- In essence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about sence religious issues No threat to Israel Palestinian territorial continuity is not a threat to A continuous Palestinian territory is no essential Israel threat to Israel

Table 1: Wording of the analyzed items

Two other statements, included only in the pre-test attitude scale, were used as indicators for the participants’ a priori mental models: 1. The conflict can only be resolved by a political settlement, and 2. Palestinians are incapable of managing their own affairs. These statements are far from sufficient to enable us to reconstruct participants’ mental models in detail. Nevertheless, they at least suggest whether or not participants frame the conflict with a de-escalation oriented model (political settlement needed and Palestinians as possible partners in this process). Each of the above statements was to be evaluated on a 5-point scale with the categories "agree," "rather agree," "unde-

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cided," "rather disagree" and "disagree." Since some participants did not respond to the items, a sixth response category, "no answer," was added.

2.4 Statistical methods In order to test our hypotheses, both classical statistical methods and Latent Class Analysis (LCA) were applied to the participants’ responses to the respective items of the pre- and post-test questionnaires.

Hypotheses 1 and 2 were tested with a t-test for repeated measurement and Analyses of Variance, with the experimental factors pre-post and text version and the responses to the religious conflict and no threat statements used as dependent variables. For these analyses, the "no-answer" responses were treated as "undecided," producing a five-point scale with the endpoints "agree" and "disagree." Hypothesis 3 was tested by entering the pre- and post-test responses to the religious conflict and no threat statements into a LCA, thus identifying different types of change between the pre- and post-test assessments of these issues. Hypotheses 4a–4d were tested using contingency analysis, relating these types of change to the respective questions from the general questionnaire. As well, the questions were correlated with the direction of pre-post change in agreement with the religious conflict and no threat statements (0 = change towards disagreement, 1 = no change, 2 = change towards agreement). Hypothesis 5 was tested by classifying the participants’ a priori mental models with an LCA of the responses to the political settlement and Palestinians incapable items and relating the resulting classes via contingency analysis to the types and direction of pre-post change. In the LCAs, the "no answer" responses were treated as a response category of its own, and – due to the rather small size of our sample – model selection was based on the AIC Index rather than using BIC or CAIC, which are suitable for large samples only, where AIC bears the risk of choosing over-parameterized models.

2.5 Complexity of the experimental procedure The remaining items included in the attitude scales were not used as data for the present study, but mainly served to con- ceal the fact that the participants had to respond twice (during pre- and during post-test) to the same (religious conflict and no threat) statements. Moreover, these items and the other instruments not used as data stimulated participants to think in various ways about the information presented in the text and to integrate it into their mental models. Already during the pre-test they had to respond to questions about their political and personal views, about their position regarding Israel and about their understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After reading the texts, they had to recollect and recontextualize the information, evaluate its quality, and again give some indication of their understanding of the conflict. All these activities stimulated the integration of the information into the participants’ mental models of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and may have influenced how and to what extent they did so. Consequently, we were measuring not just the influence of the texts and their framing, but also the influence of a complex process of coming to terms with how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be understood.

3Results 3.1 Sample characteristics The experiment was conducted between February 15 and December 6, 2005. The study participants were 227 students from the University of Konstanz who were randomly assigned to the three experimental conditions. The students’ ages ranged between 18 and 47 years (M = 23.03; SD = 4.95). They had been enrolled for between 1 and 14 semesters (M = 3.11; SD = 2.97). 70.5% were female; 29.1% male; 0.4% did not specify. 89.4% were German citizens; 8.8% other nationality, 1.8% did not specify. 40.5% were Catholic; 30.4% Protestant; 4.0% other; 22.5% no religion; 1.8% did not specify. 79.3% were psychology students; 19.8% other; 0.9% did not specify. The majority of the participants described their personal views as in general liberal (14.1%) or rather liberal (55.1%), and their political orientation with respect to foreign policy as located in a range between left (5.3%), rather left (35.9%) and moderate (34.2%), 13.7% felt indifferent to foreign policy. 95.6% had never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories, and the majority of the participants described their knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as moderate (32.5%) or limited (36.8%).

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Not surprisingly, several of the students had never heard of "Eretz Israel" before and didn’t understand the term, which is rarely used in German discourse. The students’ general political knowledge seemed rather limited, as several also admitted to being unfamiliar with the term "interim solution." Nonetheless, the majority of the students affirmed that the Israeli- Palestinian conflict should have moderate (53.4%), high (27.4%) or even very high (5.65) relevance for German foreign policy. During the experiment, the participants were randomly assigned to the experimental groups, and the comparison of the participants’ pre-test responses to the variables "Religious conflict" (F = 0.518, df = 2, p = 0.597) and "No threat to Israel" (F = 0.086, df = 2, p = 0.918) confirmed that there were no significant a priori differences between the experimental groups with respect to the participants’ assessments of these issues (cf. Table 2).

Pre-test responses Text framing n Religious conflict No threat to Israel MSDMSD Neutral 77 1.73 1.108 1.81 0.932 Pro-state 75 1.60 1.053 1.80 0.944 Anti-state 75 1.56 1.017 1.75 1.001 Total 227 1.63 1.058 1.78 0.956

Table 2: A priori differences between the experimental groups

3.2 Over-all influence of the experimental procedures In order to form an initial picture of the influence exerted by the experimental procedures on participants’ assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the pre- and post-test scores on the two items were compared. The results showed that: • participants’ agreement with interpreting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as essentially religious declined significantly (t = -3.599, df = 226, p < 0.001), and • participants’ agreement with the no threat statement significantly increased (t = 4.101, df = 226, p < 0.001) after reading the text about the Knesset’s approval of the Road Map (cf. Table 3). Hypotheses 1 and 6 were thus confirmed.

n Religious conflict No threat to Israel MSDMSD Pre-test 227 1.63 1.058 1.78 0.956 Post-test 227 1.81 1.124 1.56 0.964

Table 3: Mean differences between pre- and post-test scores

3.3 Framing effects In contrast to the Israeli study (Peleg & Alimi, 2005), which demonstrated a clear effect of text frames on participants’ attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such an effect was not found among the German students.

Differences between pre- and post-test responses Text framing n Religious conflic No threat to Israel MSDMSD Neutral 77 -0.18 0.790 0.36 0.826 Pro-state 75 -0.15 0.672 0.15 0.849 Anti-state 75 -0.20 0.753 0.17 0.844 Total 227 -0.18 0.738 0.23 0.842

Table 4: Differences between the experimental groups

There were no significant differences between the experimental groups with respect to how they changed their response to the two items from pre- to post-test ("Religious conflict": F = 0.101, df = 2, p = 0.904; "No threat": F = 1.515, df = 2, p = 0.222) (cf. Table 4). Accordingly, Hypothesis 2 must be rejected.

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Relating this result to those reported in sections 3.1 and 3.2, we can thus conclude that there is a significant main effect between pre- and post-test, but neither a significant main effect of the text version nor a significant interaction between the two experimental factors. This conclusion is also confirmed by two-way ANOVA (see Table 5).

Religious conflict No threat Factor Fdfp Fdfp Pre-Post 11.173 1 p = 0.001 22,006 1 p < 0.001 Text version 0.691 2 p = 0.502 0.152 2 p = 0.859 Interaction 0.252 2 p = 0.777 0.559 2 p = 0.211

Table 5: Two-way Analysis of variance

3.4 Types of response patterns Since it cannot be assumed that the experimental procedure affected all participants in the same linear way, LCA was used to analyze the participants’ response patterns in a more detailed way. According to the AIC criterion, this analysis made possible the identification of five latent classes or types of response patterns (cf. Table 6) which correlate with the participants’ (self-estimated) knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Chi-Square = 22.94, df = 12, p < 0.05) (cf. Figure 1). Both Hypotheses 3 and 4d are thus confirmed. The mean membership probability with which the participants could be assigned to the latent classes was p = 0.91.

h ln(L) n(P) AIC 1 -1324.09 20 2688.18 2 -1240.98 41 2563.97 3 -1193.03 62 2510.07 4 -1167.94 83 2501.87 5 -1139.17 104 2486.33 6 -1121.16 125 2492.32

Table 6: Goodness of Fit Statistics for the Latent Class Models (h = Number of Classes)

Know ledge x Class size

0,4 0,35 0,3 Type 1 0,25 Type 2 0,2 Type 3 0,15 Type 4 0,1 Type 5 0,05 0 medium little very little no answ er

Estimated know ledge of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict

Figure 1: Class sizes within knowledge groups

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No ans w e r

18% 16% 14% Religious conflict Pr e- tes t 12% Religious conflict 10% Pos t- tes t 8% No threat to Israel Pr e- tes t 6% No threat to Israel 4% Pos t- Tes t: 2% 0% Type Type Type Type Type 1 2 3 4 5

Figure 2: Frequency of "no answer" responses

Describing the classes in terms of their (mean) response tendencies and the ambivalence of the responses (standard de- viations), we observe that Type 2 (27.3% of the Ss) and Type 5 (8.6%) tend to disagree a priori with the religious character of the conflict and to see no threat in Palestinian territorial continuity. After reading the texts, both these tendencies were strengthened (cf. Figure 3). • Type 5, which is over-represented among participants who estimated their knowledge as moderate, however, is a priori more ambivalent about both issues than Type 2, which is over-represented among those participants who estimated their knowledge as limited. • Although this ambivalence declined after reading the texts, Type 5 also remained a posteriori ambivalent about the no threat issue.

Mean assessment Standard deviation

4,0 2,0

Type 1 1,5 Type 1 Type 2 Type 2 2,0 Type 3 1,0 Type 3 Type 4 Type 4 Type 5 agree - disagree Type 5 0,5

0,0 pre post pre post 0,0 pre post pre post Religious conflict No threat Religious conflict No threat

Figure 3: Mean and standard deviation of the latent distributions of Type 2 and Type 5

Type 1 (28.6%) and Type 4 (16.8%) both tend to agree a priori with the religious character of the conflict (cf. Figure 4).

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• While for Type 4 this tendency declines after reading the texts, this is not the case for Type 1, which is over-represented among the participants who estimated their knowledge as very limited or didn’t answer the question at all. • Moreover, Type 1 shows a weak a priori tendency to disagree with the no threat claim, whereas this is not the case with Type 4, which is over-represented among those participants who estimated their knowledge as moderate. Al- though Type 4 is a priori more ambivalent about this issue, it clearly tends to agree with it. • While Type 1 becomes more undecided and ambivalent about this issue a posteriori, Type 4 increases its tendency to see no threat and becomes less ambivalent about it.

Mean assessment Standard deviation

4,0 2,0

Type 1 1,5 Type 1 2,0 Type 2 Type 2 Type 3 1,0 Type 3 Type 4 Type 4 agree - disagree Type 5 Type 5 0,5 0,0 pre post pre post

Religious conflict No threat 0,0 pre post pre post

Religious conflict No threat

Figure 4: Mean and standard deviation of the latent distributions of Type 1 and Type 4

Type 3 (18.7%), finally, is over-represented among those participants who didn’t answer the question on their knowledge about the conflict and also shows a high frequency of "no answer" responses on the religious conflict and no threat issues (cf. Figure 6). While this type shows some tendency to interpret the conflict as religious, it is undecided about the no threat issue (cf. Figure 5).

Mean assessment Standard deviation

4,0 2,0

Type 1 1,5 Type 1 Type 2 Type 2 2,0 Type 3 1,0 Type 3 Type 4 Type 4 Type 5 agree - disagree Type 5 0,5

0,0 pre post pre post 0,0 pre post pre post Religious conflict No threat Religious conflict No threat

Figure 5: Mean and standard deviation of the latent distribution of Type 3

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• A posteriori, the frequency of "no answer" responses declines on both issues, and the tendency to interpret the conflict as religious also declines. • With respect to the no threat issue, however, this type – which is the least ambivalent about both issues during pre- and post-tests – remains as undecided as before. Summarizing these results, we may conclude that reading texts about the approval of the Road Map influenced not only participants’ response tendencies, but also the ambivalence of their responses. Moreover, not all types shifted towards interpreting the essence of the conflict as less religious and Palestinian territorial continuity as less threatening to Israel. • Type 1 did not reduce its tendency to interpret the conflict as religious, and • Type 3 did not shift towards more support for the no threat statement, but instead remained as undecided as before. Relating these types of response patterns to the experimental groups did not demonstrate a significant correlation between the participants’ class membership and the experimental groups to which they belonged, however (Chi-Square = 8.98; df = 8, p > 0.25). Hypothesis 2, therefore, must also be rejected on the basis of this more detailed analysis: text frames affected neither the pre-post differences among participants’ responses, nor the various classes into which they could be grouped according to their response patterns.

3.5 Effects of inter-subject factors Moreover, membership in the various classes is also independent of the participants’ estimates: • of their political orientation with respect to foreign policy (grouped into "left or rather left," "in-between," "right or rather right" and "indifferent or no answer": Chi-Square = 22.82, df = 24, p > 0.5), • of their personal views (grouped into "liberal," "rather liberal," "neither liberal nor conservative" and "rather conservative, conservative or no answer": Chi-Square = 7.55, df = 20, p > 0.99), and • of the relevance they think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have for German foreign policy (grouped into "very high or high," "medium" and "low, very low or no answer": Chi-Square = 22.71, df = 20, p > 0.25). Hypotheses 4a – 4c, therefore, must be rejected.

3.6 Grouping of participants with respect to their mental models Latent Class Analysis of the responses to the pre-test political settlement and Palestinians incapable items produced three latent classes (cf. Table 7), two of which indicate that the participants framed the conflict with a de-escalation oriented mental model. The mean membership probability with which the participants could be assigned to the latent classes was p = 83.

h ln(L) n(P) AIC 1 -612.53 10 1245.07 2 -588.21 21 1218.41 3 -576.80 32 1217.61

Table 7: Goodness of Fit Statistics for the Latent Class Models (h = Number of Classes)

Class 1 (62.05%) and Class 2 (33.34%) tend to agree that conflict resolution can come about only via political settlement and to disagree with the Palestinians’ inability to manage their own affairs (cf. Figure 6). • While Class 1 is relatively more uncertain about the need for a political settlement, however, • Class 2 is more uncertain about Palestinian (in)ability.

Class 3, finally, is a very small class of participants (4.61%) who obviously lack a stable mental model with which to interpret the conflict. • Many of the participants in this class leave the respective questions unanswered (cf. Figure 7), • and the rest are undecided about the need for a political settlement and extremely undecided about Palestinian (in)ability (cf. Figure 6).

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Mean assessment Standard deviation

4,0 2,0

1,5

Political Political settlement settlement

2,0 1,0

Palestinians Palestinians

incapable incapable

0,5

0,0 0,0 Class 1 Class 2 Class 3 Class 1 Class 2 Class 3

Figure 6: Mean and standard deviation of the latent distributions

No ans w e r

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% Political settlement 50% Palestinians 40% incapable 30% 20% 10% 0% Class 1 Class 2 Class 3

Figure 7: Frequency of "no answer" responses

3.7 Influence of mental models on pre-post response patterns Cross-tabulating these classes with the types of pre-post response patterns identified in section 3.4 revealed a significant correlation (χ2 = 16.757; df = 4, p = 0.002) (cf. Figure 8). Since the number of participants in Class 3 was too small, however, the Pearson χ2-statistic was only computed for the first two classes (n = 217). • The response pattern which strengthened tendencies to both interpret the conflict as non-religious and Palestinian territorial continuity as not threatening (Type 2) was over-represented among participants who interpreted the conflict within a de-escalation oriented mental model (Class 1 and Class 2). • Among these, the response pattern which strengthened its tendency to interpret the conflict as not religious but stayed ambivalent about the no threat issue (Type 5) was over-represented among participants more undecided about Palestinian (in)ability (Class 2), whereas

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• the response pattern which did not reduce the religious interpretation of the conflict and became undecided and more ambivalent about the no threat issue during the post-test (Type 1) was over-represented among those participants who were more ambivalent about the need for a political settlement (Class 1), and • the response pattern which reduced its acceptance of the religious interpretation of the conflict and strengthened its tendency to see no threat (Type 4) was over-represented among those participants who were relatively less undecided about the need for a political settlement (Class 2). • The response pattern that gave many "no answer" responses and was undecided about the threat during both pre- and post-test (Type 3), finally, was over-represented among the participants lacking a stable mental model with which to interpret the conflict (Class 3).

Cla sse s x type s

70%

60%

50% Type 1

40% Type 2 Type 3 30% Type 4

20% Type 5

10%

0% Class 1 Class 2 Class 3

Figure 8: Response types within classes

3.8 Influence of mental models on the direction of pre-post change Cross-tabulating the mental models with the direction of pre-post change produced significant results only for the religious interpretation of the conflict (χ2 = 17.46, df = 4, p < 0.005) (cf. Figure 9).

Classes x change

80%

70%

60%

50% => not religious 40% no change

30% => religious

20%

10%

0% Class 2 Class 1 Class 3

Figure 9: Change of religious interpretation within classes

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• While the majority of the participants who framed the conflict within a de-escalation oriented model didn’t change their assessment of this issue (Class 2: 67.7%; Class 1: 64.7%), or changed it towards less religious (Class 2: 25.4%; Class 1: 24.2%), • the effect was quite the opposite with participants who lacked a stable mental model (Class 3). While only 32.2 % of these participants didn’t change their assessments, 52.3% shifted towards more religious. Examining the participants’ post-test interpretation of this issue (cf. Figure 10), however, shows that this was mainly a shift from (rather) religious towards undecided or no answer (67.6%). During the pre-test, 73.8% of the participants lacking a stable mental model had (rather) disagreed with the religious interpretation of the conflict. Now they became confused about this issue as well.

Classes x post-test

80%

70%

60% (rather) 50% religious undecided / no 40% answ er 30% (rather) not religious 20%

10%

0% Class 2 Class 1 Class 3

Figure 10: Post-test religious interpretation within classes

With respect to the perceived threat, there was no significant correlation between pre-post change and the participants’ mental models (χ2 = 8.91, df = 4, p > 0.05).

3.9 Influence of inter-subject factors on the direction of pre-post change Correlating the direction of change with the participants’ political orientation toward foreign policy, their personal views in general, the relevance they think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have for German foreign policy and their self-estimated knowledge of the conflict produced no significant results for either the religious conflict or the no threat issues (cf. Table 8). Hypotheses 4a–4d can thus be rejected.

Political orientation Personal views Relevance Knowledge Religious conflict r = -0.051 r = -0.041 r = 0.116 r = 0.070 p = 0.443 p = 0.535 p = 0.082 p = 0.293 No threat r = 0.006 r = -0.019 r = -0.019 r = 0.041 p = 0,930 p = 0.777 p = 0.777 p = 0.537

Table 8: Correlation of the direction of pre-post change with the inter-subject factors

Relating these results to those in sections 3.7 and 3.8, we conclude that Hypothesis 5 is confirmed with respect to the participants’ response patterns, but only partially confirmed with respect to the direction of pre-post change.

4 Discussion Because it repeated an experiment whose design and instruments were not open for modification and used as subjects German students, who are traditionally rather peace-oriented and similar in their political views, the limitations of the present pilot study cannot be ignored. In particular the assessment of the participants’ a priori mental models by means of

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only two items can create doubts about the reliability of the results. Due to the reasonably high membership probabilities with which the participants could be assigned to the latent classes, these doubts can be dispelled, however. Moreover, since the data from the Israeli study were not available to the author, this is not a cross-cultural study in the true sense of the word, and the possibilities for cross-cultural comparison are limited to comparing the results with the earlier work by Peleg & Alimi (2005). Nonetheless, the results confirmed some of our theoretical assumptions and suggested a number of further hypotheses which should be addressed in the forthcoming project. 1. The results confirm the hypotheses that if participants read texts and integrate the presented information into their mental models, this will affect (Hypothesis 1) their assessment of both issues directly touched on by the information presented in the texts (no threat) and issues related to it only via the structure of the participants’ mental models (religious conflict) (Hypothesis 6). 2. As expected, this effect is not uniform (Hypothesis 3), but depends on the participants’ a priori mental models, which, therefore, prove to be more powerful predictors of how participants change their assessments than inter-subject variables such as their political orientation, personal views, relevance attribution and knowledge of the conflict (Hypoth- esis 5). 3. Participants’ political orientations, their personal views and the relevance they think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have for German foreign policy did not prove useful as predictors (lack of support for Hypotheses 4a – 4c), but this may be due to the relative homogeneity of the sample with respect to these variables. 4. With respect to the participants’ (self-estimated) knowledge of the conflict (Hypothesis 4d), the results are not un- equivocal. Nonetheless, knowledge of the conflict seems to be a crucial factor in determining whether or not participants have a mental model of the conflict. 5. In contrast to the Israeli study by Peleg & Alimi (2005), the present study failed to demonstrate any effect of text framing, however (lack of support for Hypothesis 3). There may be various reasons for the differences. One might be that the text framing was too weak. The texts themselves were neutral and (nearly) identical. Only the headlines and subheadings anticipated some of the information in the following paragraphs and thus underlined its relevance. But if the framing was too weak, how could Peleg & Alimi have demonstrated framing effects using the same material we used in the present study? One possible explanation is that the participants in our study – mainly psychology students – had too little political knowledge, both in general and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. The previous state of research on the links between political sophistication and susceptibility to being influenced by media frames is, however, complex. While some studies find that less well-informed participants are more strongly influenced by media frames (e.g., Haider-Markel & Jocelyn, 2002; Haack, 2007), others reach the opposite conclusion (e.g., Nelson, Claw- son & Oxley, 1997). Another possibility might be that – in contrast to Peleg & Alimi, who worked with Israeli students – our participants were too remote from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and their mental models of the conflict were therefore less flexible. This explanation would be in accordance with a finding of Bläsi et al. (2005) that presumably less personally involved German and Greek journalists modified the mental models with which they interpreted the conflicts in former Yugoslavia after the fall of Milosevic much less than did Serbian journalists. If this explains why we failed to demonstrate framing effects in the present study, we will have to reconsider our basic theoretical assumptions, drawing on the work of Bar-Tal (1998). Instead of postulating a linear negative relationship between the degree of involvement and the flexibility of the mental models with which conflict is interpreted, we would have to assume that the relationship is non-linear, with the highest degree of flexibility among moderately involved subjects. There would be less flexibility when the subject is disinterested than when involvement is high. This explanation is not very plausible, however. At least in the most violent stage of a war, we would expect that those most directly involved and affected will be the most rigid and their mental models the least flexible. But the situation is different in Israel (as it was also different in Serbia after the fall of Milosevic). Regardless of its failings, Israel has been engaged in a peace process for a dozen years, and it can be assumed that (like many Israelis) the Israeli participants experienced a sort of inner conflict between competing mental models, interpreting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as either a win-lose or a win-win process. Both of these models are associated with positive and negative emotions, with emotions of security and threat. The escalation-oriented (win-lose) model permits holding onto the behavioral strategies that preserved the Israeli state during past decades (security), but implies continuing war and violence (threat). The de-escalation oriented (win-win) model promises an end to war and violence (security), but implies a change in behavioral strategies whose effectiveness in guaranteeing the survival of Israel has not yet been demonstrated (threat).

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Taking this into account, we may assume that the framing effects observed in the Israeli study were due to the selective activation of these different mental models by different frames. To the German Ss, on the other hand, only one (if any) mental model was available. Since they are not directly affected by the conflict, they simply tried to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one way or another and – due to the lessons of the Third Reich ("No more war, no more fascism") – they tended to interpret the conflict within a de-escalation oriented (win-win) model. In the author’s opinion, this is the most plausible explanation of the differences between the Israeli and the German findings, and we may summarize the results of our study by formulating two further hypotheses that should be addressed in a cross-cultural study: 1. News recipients do not always have a mental model. Consequently the influence of political news is not solely dependent on their having a particular kind of mental model, but also on whether they have such a model at all. 2. The influence of framing is mediated by the activation of different mental models and, therefore, should be the strongest in cases where competing mental models are available to recipients. If we proceed from these assumptions, we arrive at similar prognoses as Zaller (1992), who explains contradictory findings on the linkage between political sophistication and susceptibility to being influenced by media frames with a two-step model of attitude change: While information absorption (Step 1) is a positive function of prior knowledge, dissonant frames are only rejected (Step 2) if the subject disposes of sufficient prior knowledge to recognize dissonance. Consequently, subjects with the greatest previous knowledge are simultaneously both those most likely to absorb information and those least likely to be influenced by it, so that a curvilinear relationship arises between prior knowledge and attitude change: Subjects with moderate prior knowledge will be the most strongly influenced, because they are more likely to absorb information than those with little prior knowledge and also because they are more likely to be persuaded than subjects with more prior knowledge. The above-formulated hypotheses make Zaller’s model more specific, in the sense that: (1) information is only absorbed to the extent that it is meaningful, which requires, on one side, a certain amount of prior knowledge, and, on the other side, the availability of a mental model in the light of which information can be interpreted. (2) While the same preconditions also apply for the rejection of dissonant frames incompatible with the respective mental model, an additional presupposition is also added for susceptibility to being influenced by dissonant frames: the availability of an alternative mental model which is congruent with this frame. (3) The availability of alternative models is inversely proportional to how strongly the respective model is both supported by knowledge and emotionally anchored. Recipients’ susceptibility to being influenced is therefore a function of not only their previous knowledge, but also their emotional ambivalence regarding the issue of concern.

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About the author: Wilhelm Kempf, since 1977 Professor for Psychological Methodology and Head of the Peace Research Group at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Since 2002 editor of conflict & communication online. Special areas of interest: nonviolent conflict solutions, the construction of social reality by the mass media. Recent books: Konflikt und Gewalt (Münster: agenda, 2000); Los Medios y la Cultura de Paz (with Sonia Gutiérrez Villalobos, Berlin: regener, 2001); Journalism and the New World Order. Vol. II. Studying War and the Media (with Heikki Luostarinen, Göteborg: Nordicom, 2002); Constructive Conflict Coverage (edited by the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution: Berlin: regener, 2003).

Address: Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany. Website: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/SozWiss/fg-psy/ag-meth/ eMail: [email protected]

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Stig A. Nohrstedt & Rune Ottosen Kriegsjournalismus in der Bedrohungsgesellschaft: Friedensjournalismus als Strategie zu Herausforderung der gelenkten Kultur der Angst?

Die mögliche Entwicklung der Risiko-Gesellschaft zu etwas, das man als eine Bedrohungsgesellschaft bezeichnen könnte, in der Bedrohungswahrnehmungen von der Politik in einem Maße ausgebeutet werden, wie es in der Moderne selten da gewesen ist, stellt in vielerlei Hinsicht eine Herausforderung für den Konflikt- und

Friedensjournalismus dar. Der Kontext des Krieges gegen den Terror als vorherrschende globale Diskursordnung und das Fehlen einer konsistenten Strategie zur Demokratisierung von Nachkriegsgesellschaften, ebenso wie Kriegspropaganda, Wahrnehmungsmanagement und psychologische Operationen als Teil der Medienkriege, die parallel zu den militärischen Operationen geführt werden, verleihen der Diskussion über Relevanz, Tragweite und Anwendbarkeit friedensjournalistischer Modelle und/oder Philosophien in der aktuellen internationalen Lage höchste Dringlichkeit. Der vorliegende Aufsatz skizziert Ansatzpunkte für eine solche Diskussion in der Bedrohungsgesellschaft.

Volltext (in Englisch)

Zu den Autoren: Stig Arne Nohrstedt, Ph.D ist Professor für Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften an der Universität Örebro, Schweden. Seine Forschungsgebiete beinhalten Kriegs- und Konfliktjournalismus, journalistische Ethik und Rollen, Risiko- und Krisenkommunikation sowie Medien und strukturelle Diskriminierung. Aktuelle Buchpublikationen: Nohrstedt, S.A. & Ottosen, R. (eds.) (2005): Global War - Local Views. Media Images of the Iraq War. Göteborg: Nordicom; Nohrstedt, S.A. & Ottosen, R. (eds.) (2004): US and the Others. Göteborg: Nordicom. eMail: [email protected]

Rune Ottosen, geb. 1950, Cand. Polit. in Politikwissenschaften (University of Oslo, 1984), BA in Journalismus (Norwegian College of Journalism, 1973), arbeitete als Journalist in verschiedenen Medien (1977-84); Lecturer und Research Fellow am Norwegian College of Journalism (1984-88); Information Director und Research Fellow am Internationale Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) (1989-92); Research Fellow bei der Norwegian Federation of Journalists (1993-95); seit 1996 Professor an der Fakultät für Journalismus, Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaften des Oslo College. Ottosen ist Präsident der Norwegian Association of Non-fiction Writers and Translatorsund Autor einer Vielzahl von Büchern und Artikeln zur Geschichte des Journalismus und zu Themen, welche die die Relation von Krieg und Journalismus betreffen. Aktuelle Buchpublikationen: Journalism and the New World Order, Vol. I. Gulf War, National News Discourses and Globalization (ed., mit Stig-Arne Nohrstedt, 2000); Kosovokonflikten, medierna och medlidandet (The Kosovo Conflict, Media and Compassion, 2002). eMail: [email protected]

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Stig A. Nohrstedt & Rune Ottosen War Journalism in the Threat Society: Peace journalism as a strategy for challenging the mediated culture of fear?

The possible development of the Risk Society into what could be called the Threat Society, in which threat perceptions are exploited in politics to a degree seldom seen in modernity, seriously challenges conflict and peace journalism in many new ways. The context of the Global War on Terror as the dominant global discursive order, and the lack of a consistent strategy for democratisation in post-conflict countries, together with visual war propaganda, perception management and psychological operations as part of the media wars conducted alongside of military operations, all make it urgent to discuss the relevance, reach and applicability of the peace journalism model and/or philosophy in the present international situation. This article outlines points of departure for such a discussion in the Threat Society.

full text (in English)

About the authors: Stig Arne Nohrstedt, Ph.D is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Örebro, Sweden. His Research areas include war and conflict journalism, journalistic ethics and roles, risk and crisis communication and media and structural discrimination. Recent books: Nohrstedt, S.A. & Ottosen, R. (eds.) (2005): Global War - Local Views: Media Images of the Iraq War. Göteborg: Nordicom; Nohrstedt, S.A. & Ottosen, R. (eds.) (2004): US and the Others. Göteborg: Nordicom. eMail: [email protected]

Rune Ottosen, b. 1950, Cand. polit. in Political Science (University of Oslo, 1984), BA in Journalism (Norwegian College of Journalism, 1973); Journalist in various media (1977-84); Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Norwegian College of Journalism (1984-88); Information Director and Research Fellow at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) (1989-92); Research Fellow at the Norwegian Federation of Journalists (1993-95); Associate Professor at the Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science, Oslo College, since 1996; Professor in the same institution from 1999; Ottosen is also the president of the Norwegian Association of Non-Fiction Authors and Translators. Author of several books and articles on journalism history and topics related to war and journalism. Recent book publications: Journalism and the New World Order, Vol. I. Gulf War, National News Discourses and Globalization (ed. with Stig-Arne Nohrstedt, 2000); Kosovokonflikten, medierna och medlidandet (The Kosovo Conflict, Media and Compassion, 2002). eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Stig A. Nohrstedt & Rune Ottosen War Journalism in the Threat Society: Peace journalism as a strategy for challenging the mediated culture of fear?

Kurzfassung: Die mögliche Entwicklung der Risiko-Gesellschaft zu etwas, das man als eine Bedrohungsgesellschaft bezeichnen könnte, in der Bedrohungswahrnehmungen von der Politik in einem Maße ausgebeutet werden, wie es in der Moderne selten da gewesen ist, stellt in vielerlei Hinsicht eine Herausforderung für den Konflikt- und Friedensjournalismus dar. Der Kontext des Krieges gegen den Terror als vorherrschende globale Diskursordnung und das Fehlen einer konsistenten Strategie zur Demokratisierung von Nachkriegsgesellschaften, ebenso wie Kriegspropaganda, Wahrnehmungsmanagement und psychologische Opera- tionen als Teil der Medienkriege, die parallel zu den militärischen Operationen geführt werden, verleihen der Diskussion über Relevanz, Tragweite und Anwendbarkeit friedensjournalistischer Modelle und/oder Philosophien in der aktuellen internationalen Lage höchste Dring- lichkeit. Der vorliegende Aufsatz skizziert Ansatzpunkte für eine solche Diskussion in der Bedrohungsgesellschaft.

Abstract: The possible development of the Risk Society into what could be called the Threat Society, in which threat perceptions are exploited in politics to a degree seldom seen in modernity, seriously challenges conflict and peace journalism in many new ways. The context of the Global War on Terror as the dominant global discursive order, and the lack of a consistent strategy for democratisation in post- conflict countries, together with visual war propaganda, perception management and psychological operations as part of the media wars conducted alongside of military operations, all make it urgent to discuss the relevance, reach and applicability of the peace journalism model and/or philosophy in the present international situation. This article outlines points of departure for such a discussion in the Threat Society.

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Introduction The Global War on Terror (GWOT) and environmental issues like global warming and climate change constitute part of what seems to be an historical change from a Risk Society to a Threat Society, with a culture of fear challenging journalism in more dramatic ways than perhaps ever before. Threat perception management has become a central element of politics in general and of identity politics in particular. Fear of 9/11-like events makes it possible for governments to pass emer- gency legislation and creates a public environment where permanent fear has become the predominant state of mind. In this situation, journalism must find new ways of mobilising public support for democratic and peace promoting ideals (Plu- dowski 2007). This article focuses on the consequences of these trends for war and peace journalism in late modernity. Risk is a central notion in the debate on the Threat Society. Stuart Allan (2002), for instance, defines risk as: "The chance or possibility of danger (harm, loss, injury and so forth) or other adverse consequences actually happening." In a modern society, it is difficult to imagine a public discourse on poverty and peace without discussing the role of the mass media. In his latest book, Toby Miller (2007) introduces the notion of "Cultural Citizenship" as a tool to analyse the role of the media as an arena for discourses on development and peace issues. He writes: "for cultural studies, cultural citizenship concerns the maintenance, development, and exchange of cultural lineage – a celebration of difference, which is also a critique of the status quo" (ibid.: 23). Understanding the role of the media is essential for understanding a modern global marketplace, because the mass media are themselves part of the WTO negotiations and other arenas of the power struggles between the developing world and the rich "North" (Tveiten 2007). But mass media are also essential in framing and creating an understanding of global issues like terrorism and war (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2004). The thesis of this article is that the GWOT is not just another war – not even a new war – but something of much greater magnitude, namely a global conflict between the dominant, rich power centres of the world and the dominated, poor pe- ripheral peoples and cultures. In addition, it is a conflict driven by and embedded in an emerging trans-national culture of fear. At a discursive level, this would imply a shift from representations of risks in terms of probabilities, unforeseeable consequences and uncertainty to representations of threats in terms of certainty and predictable negative consequences in the near future (Höijer 2006: 2). On the one hand, the culture of fear, with its imagined increase in threats and dangers, fosters a widespread desire for knowledge and understanding of the accuracy of these perceptions and the conditions behind one’s own anxieties and fears. On the other hand, news journalism is becoming less and less able to satisfy the growing need for reflexivity, probably for a number of reasons that have to do with crucial trends in late modernity. This mismatch between knowledge needs and current media trends can be outlined as follows, with regard to processes of globalisation, the mediation of a culture of fear, changes in the global mediascape, and the increase in visual communication in the media culture. We will elaborate on the needs and possibilities of a reflexive and conscious journalism in the late-modern culture of fear with a discussion of: first, the shift from the Risk Society to the Threat Society; second, the special features of GWOT discourse; third, the importance of new media; fourth, the implications of visualisation in the media culture and; fifth, concrete findings from an analysis of a Norwegian newspaper’s coverage of the Iraq war.

Theoretical background: Journalism in the New World Order The origins of recent trends in what we might call a global conflict discourse can be traced back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The "new world order," as defined by George Bush senior in connection with the 1991 Gulf War, ushered in a new era of US hegemony. In conjunction with the ICT revolution, all issues concerning ‘international’ and academic concerns about ‘space’ in general have changed (Ekecrantz 2007:169). The dramatic events of 9/11 once again altered the ‘global discourse order’ (Fairclough 2006). The war on terror has shifted the focus, and the power centres in the North have defined a new agenda reflecting their global interests (Miller 2007). The subsequent media flows and failures are part of a larger international problem anchored in our mainstream system (Schechter 2006:79). Findings from our Gulf War study suggest that the significance of the 1991 Gulf War has been regrettably – and much more than we think – underestimated as a global media event influencing current global conflict formation (Nohrstedt and Ot- tosen 2001, 2004, 2005; Nohrstedt, Höijer and Ottosen 2002). A book published in 2001, Journalism and the New World Order, suggests that the 1991 Gulf War ‘will haunt us for decades and perhaps centuries to come’. The reason for this prediction was that the 1991 war was a confrontation between the Muslim world and the West. Many Muslims regarded the war as an attack on the Muslim nation (al-Umah), a military coalition with a United Nations mandate led by the United States, fighting what many on the Western side thought was a just war to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The schism between the general public in the Muslim world and in the West, along with its allies in certain Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, can be regarded as helping to create a breeding ground for radical Islamist groups and terror organisations like al- Qaida. The 1991 Gulf War was also a breakthrough for modern propaganda techniques, broadcast live by CNN on a global scale (Nohrstedt and Ottosen 2001).

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The popular simplistic enemy image of Saddam Hussein as a ‘new Hitler’, a villain who violated international laws and human rights, framed the global news and overshadowed many of the structural issues involved in the conflict, such as access to oil, religious and cultural issues, and the struggle for political and military hegemony over the entire region. Similarly simplistic propaganda was used by the Western powers and NATO in later conflicts. The Hitler metaphor was repeated during NATO military operations in former Yugoslavia in 1999, this time in reference to Slobodan Milosevic. The concept of humanitarian intervention was further developed and used to justify the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia to stop Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Again, we heard that ‘evil’ had to be stopped before Milosevic committed even worse crimes (Chomsky 1999). A more sober historical review of these conflicts suggests that the 1991 Gulf War, as well as the 1999 conflict in Yugoslavia, should remind us that in war the overall picture is never black and white. More complex issues such as the colonial heritage of Western hegemony, unresolved border disputes and competition for oil and water resources, not to speak of religious tensions, are all part of a complicated scenario that calls for dialogue and conflict resolution, as suggested in the UN Charter (Galtung 1992; Chomsky 2000). The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the war in the Middle East in the summer of 2006 involving Palestinians, Israel and Lebanon; the tensions in the Horn of Africa and the bombing of Somalia by US planes in January 2007; as well as the ongoing clashes in Sudan: all remind us that the fault lines underlying the 1991 Gulf War are still there. Every country in the Middle East has a historical legacy of myths and traumas linked to religion and the conviction of being ‘chosen’. In the Gulf War, Muslims fought Muslims. Conventional wisdom in the Western world has held that this schism in the Arab and Muslim world was part of the victory. In 1991, acting in the name of the United Nations, the Western world chose a simplistic military response to a highly complex issue, and the consequence may well be a new round of this spiral of violence, as well as the risk of new conflicts and fissures between North and South (Frank, 1992). In 1991 and 2003, we heard that a multinational humanitarian intervention would establish a new framework for democracy in the Middle East. The bombing of Yugoslavia was intended to remove the last communist-style dictatorship in Europe. Democratic rhetoric was also at the core of US propaganda preceding the invasion of Iraq, but recent events speak for themselves. The promise of democracy has faded behind the chaos and violence in Iraq, and the Balkan conflicts are still unresolved, with an uncertain future awaiting Kosovo (Nohrstedt and Ottosen 2005). The issue of relations between power politics and the UN is part of this global picture. When the US failed to rally the UN behind the war effort in Iraq, it organised the ‘coalition of the willing’ and invaded without a legal mandate. When the occupation was a fact, the UN was invited in as a ‘peace-keeping factor’. The Bush administration defined the UN as ‘irrelevant’ when, in March 2003, the majority of the member states rejected participating in the invasion. However, by the autumn of 2003, with Resolution 1511 the UN had already assumed de facto responsibility for the chaotic situation created by the illegal invasion. In the resolution, the Coalition Provisional Authority (that is, the US-UK force) is said to be ‘tempo- rary’. In Article 5, the Authority is asked to ‘return governing responsibility and authority to the people of Iraq as soon as practicable’ (Prashad 2003). There was an obvious failure to create a stable government after the 2005 election. One of the issues that the media have failed to address is what this will mean for the long-run credibility of the UN. It is also an important issue for the African media, since peace initiatives in conflict ridden areas such as Congo and Sudan are also undertaken in the name of the UN (Østerud 2007). This broad picture should be seen as the backdrop for a North-South approach to modern war and conflict. In the last decade, Africa has experienced devastating wars in, for example, Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone and Somalia. These wars have been under-reported in the Western media, because they do not represent a challenge to Western interests on the same level as do conflicts in the Middle East and Southern Asia (Thussu 2006). Since news reporting in the South still depends on news flows from the North, these wars are under-reported in Africa as well. Thussu suggests that because of the colonial past, ordinary people in the South, as well as journalists, have been more reluctant to swallow simplistic propaganda promulgated by power-centres in the North. Returning to the broader picture of the ‘New World Order’, we can see the problems inherent in forcibly imposing Western style ‘democracy’ on a resentful Iraqi population. Obviously the problems of the ‘War on Terror’ are a challenge for the global media. The contrast between US military operations in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and ‘democracy’ and America’s simultaneous refusal to accept Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian election, to name only the most glaring example, tends to discredit the very idea of democracy. This is a big challenge for the African media, since the relationship between conflict resolution and peace-keeping is defined within the framework of a UN model that has failed in the ‘War on Terror’. Norwegian political scientist Øivind Østerud is among those who have documented that the most violent and conflict-ridden areas are the ones where the US has forced through elections in the absence of established democratic institutions or free media. So-called democratic experiments are failing in Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon. In Iraq and the Palestinian territories it has been amply demonstrated that elections and democracy are not the same thing. When Hamas won the elections, Israel, with the full support of the US, refused to accept the results. This resulted in the breakdown of democratic Palestinian structures. In Iraq, the Sunni minority refused to accept its loss in the elections, because the sectarian parties

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that won had no policy for reconciliation and nation-building. Thus, ‘quick’ elections without any foundation in existing structures lead to chaos, because the losers do not believe that those in power will respect minorities. In the Palestinian territories, the Western powers chose to support Fatah, which lost the elections, and this undermined the legitimacy of democracy. Fatah, in the eyes of the Palestinian people, showed itself to be a mere tool of foreign interests (Østerud 2007). According to Østerud, there are two lessons to be drawn from this. The first is that holding elections does not automatically lead to democracy and stability, for if you remove a dictator like Saddam Hussein through military intervention, this may simply open the door to new forms of corruption and undemocratic structures. Elections can thus foster a democratic fiction. Secondly, semi-democracies tend to be more vulnerable to violence than authoritarian systems and real democracies. Semi-democracy provokes resistance and has no power to resist violence. There is no evidence that, in the long run, imposed elections and semi-democracies can serve democracy, since anarchy and violence tend to replace the relative stability that an authoritarian system can provide. Even though this model has failed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Middle East, it is still the chosen model for the UN in Africa. In Bosnia and Kosovo, this sort of mild neo-imperialism has produced no lasting internalized democracy. Still, it seems that this is the chosen policy of the UN in both Sudan and Congo. In the Congo, we see 20,000 soldiers from the EU and the UN, together with thousands of members of NGOs, equipped with billion-dollar budgets in an attempt to administer the Congo. On the surface, the situation seems calm after the elections in 2006, but instability and violence continue (Østerud 2007). What role can the media play in a situation like this? It is hard to believe the media could play an independent role, given the huge economic interests at stake. Congo is a resource-rich country with a great potential for profit, and the humanitarian explanation notwithstanding, economic interests are a major factor. There is obviously rivalry for hegemony in Africa among the great powers – China, the US and the EU. It is hard to imagine a UN policy isolated from these interests. Nor is it easy to imagine the media uninfluenced by these interests. In many African countries there is a well-justified suspicion of foreign intervention in the name of democracy, since the parallel to the rhetoric of the colonial past is obvious. The lack of a consistent strategy on the side of the international community for supporting democratic reforms and helping a democratic culture to prosper is a lethal weapon in the hands of dictators like President Mugabe in Zimbabwe. This underlines the urgent need for increased efforts to find a viable strategy, for example, a strategy in which journalists and media have a role to play.

Nordic studies of journalism and crises During the past few decades, several studies and reports about the role of the media in crises and risk communication have been done in the Nordic countries, but there is still a lack of basic research in the field (e.g., Sandberg & Thelander 1997, Dahlström & Flodin 1998, Vettenranta 2005, Bjerke & Dyb 2006). Paul Bjerke and Evelyn Dyb’s book Journalistikk i risikosamfunnet (Journalism in the Risk Society) builds on the theories of sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens about the risk society and late modernity. Current discussions of journalism often emphasise that contemporary media are too commercial and/or not serious enough. Bjerke and Dyb argue that the risk society has replaced the industrial society and has produced new conflict dimensions and new identities. Contemporary journalism has to be understood and explained using concepts adequate to this society. Journalism should contribute to citizens’ perceptions, understanding and responses to their society as one of great environmental risks and growing social uncertainty and insecurity. One interesting aspect in the debate on risk-journalism is the relation between the coverage of natural disasters and health risks, on the one hand, and man-made risk such as war and terror, on the other. Findings from research on tsunamis and the attack on the town of Fallujah just a few days before the tsunami suggest that the threshold for publishing details of human suffering is much higher for controversial issues like government sponsored military operations than for natural disasters like tsunamis, where only nature itself can be blamed (Ottosen 2007)

Globalisation and risk Any contemporary analysis of journalism and conflict must now also take into account the context of cultural and economic globalization ... as well as, more specifically, media globalization. (Hackett, 2006:16) Globalisation, in all its multifaceted forms, has led to increased awareness of risks and threats, even those beyond one’s immediate surroundings, and to their being perceived as more threatening than ever before. The horizon of our knowledge of conditions in distant places has broadened, and along with this we have greater insights into global threats to security and health such as terrorism, environmental pollution and epidemics spread either by people or other carriers. At the same time that globalisation is raising the level of risk and threat awareness, it is also making ever-growing demands on people’s confidence that society and the responsible authorities can protect their citizens from these dangers. According to Anthony Giddens and others, the nation state has declined in importance, and politicians have for the most part lost control over

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the course of development due to the challenge that globalization poses to the national sphere from above, below, and the side. – Power is not only shifting upwards to the global arena, but through decentralization also downwards to the local level and laterally through economic integration across national borders in the form of regional cooperation. The life world now seems chaotic and out of control, which has aroused a widespread sense of disempowerment (Giddens 2000:24, 28, 33). This experience of vulnerability in (late) modern society has, according to Ulrich Beck, led to a shift in the politics of what he calls the "Risk Society" away from being about distributing wealth to instead being about distributing risks (Beck 1992). From the perspective of a society characterized by diminishing trust, where policies are judged according to their successfully distributing risks, it is not far-fetched to predict a development towards an ever greater crisis tendency. Progress has admittedly equipped modern society to more efficiently manage a significant number of threats to its citizens’ health and safety, e.g., urban fires and once-endemic diseases such as tuberculosis and polio, but new and old dangers can still cause great harm to both people and property. In recent years, there have been natural disasters (e.g., the tsunami and hurricanes such as Katrina), accidents involving complex technical systems (e.g., air and ferry traffic, nuclear power), and international terrorism, which all provide reminders of society’s vulnerability (cf. Boin et al. 2005:1). Furthermore: "The underlying paradigm has shifted from local to global." (Lagadec 2005:3). In sum, the expanded global threat-image consciousness is presumably increasing society’s crisis tendency. This tendency is, however, complicated and notoriously difficult to predict when it comes to contingencies. A number of factors can intervene, like different knowledge and psychological strategies in reception processes, both at the individual and the collective levels. Here though our focus is restricted to the ways media may affect the threat and risk perceptions of the general public. The problem with media in this respect is that they are both carriers of globalisation processes and at the same time constrained by a rather national outlook. The implied media audiences and the framing of the news are both defined within the confines of "methodological nationalism" (Beck 2002; Beck 2006:24 ff.).

Special characteristics of the GWOT discourse A particularly complex configuration is the global discursive order that has arisen in the aftermath of 9/11. According to Fairclough, the GWOT discourse must be understood in relation to a general change in US foreign and security policy strategy from "soft power" to "hard power." In his analysis, the discourse on terrorism after 9/11 is embedded in a discursive order which connects it with discourses on globalism and the knowledge-based economy. In relation to the latter two discourses, and together with them, it constitutes "a change in the ‘nexus’ of strategies and discourses which globalism is part of and … a further inflection in the trajectory of globalism itself" (Fairclough 2006:141). In the kind of CDA that Fairclough conducts, the contextual meaning of GWOT discourse can be interpreted by establishing its relation to, on the one hand, post-9/11 changes in international politics – in particular US foreign and security policy – and, on the other hand, the previous hegemonic discourses in the global political arena. In this way he takes account of both continuity and change within the discursive order of globalism. Drawing on Jackson’s (2005) study, he further identifies four main themes that charac- terise GWOT discourse: 1. This is a new era, posing new threats, which requires new responses. 2. America and its allies (and indeed ‘civilisation’) face unprecedented risks and dangers which call for exceptional measures. 3. Those who pose these risks and dangers are the forces of ‘evil’. 4. America and its allies are the forces of ‘good’, and their actions are informed by moral values. (ibid. 144) Fairclough criticises the validity of each of these themes and argues that they are all basically false or distorted. President Bush’s statement that after 9/11 "night fell on a different world" is simply not true, according to Fairclough: "...the argument is fallacious" (p.145; italics in original). The attacks were "serious acts of terrorism," "morally indefensible" and an "indis- criminate assault on innocent civilians," as Fairclough affirms. But that does not make them inherently epoch-changing: "This attack became epoch-changing only because it was self-consciously represented in this way by politicians and officials with the power, partly through their capacity to shape the global media agenda, to make it so." (p.145). The decision to represent the attacks in this way was a legitimizing move, according to Fairclough, which gave leeway to radically new political steps and measures. In a similar vein, he argues that the second theme is "a scare-mongering overstatement," because in comparative terms the terror threat for the American people is not vast and immediate. Rather, expressions of this theme can be interpreted as "attempts to induce fear in order to legitimize policies and actions which would otherwise be unpalatable for many Americans" (p.146). The third theme is beyond the scope of rational argumentation, and representing an antagonist as ‘evil’ legitimises any number of extreme measures. Following Fairclough’s critique, the ‘evil ones’ cannot be reasoned with, negotiated with or treated as rational beings – the only possible response is war (p.147), After the 1999 Kosovo conflict, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the most outspoken promoter of the fourth theme. He claimed that ‘values and interests merge’, meaning that defending national interests and the common interests of the international community are one and the same thing. However, this seems like a rather disingenuous attempt to lend moral

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dignity and legitimacy to some particular nation-states’ interests. This is especially so since it is difficult to see "how on balance" the Iraq war has increased the moral good, as Fairclough cynically comments (p.147-48). In conclusion, then, Fairclough rejects all four main themes as invalid, either because they are simply incorrect, or are exaggerations of the actual reality. Besides the contextual and thematic dimensions of GWOT discourse, Fairclough also analyses the semantic use of notions such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘pre-emptive strikes’. He points out, as others have done before, that the term ‘terrorism’ is notoriously problematic, because it has been "used in an opportunistic way as a catch-all category to brand and condemn a wide variety of forms of the use of force, while excluding others which arguably do constitute terrorism" (p.152). The first problem is whether a distinction is made between terrorism and (legal) resistance. Secondly, in the real world there are violent actions by states that deserve to be called ‘state terrorism’, yet the practice is to exclude them from the discursive use of ‘terrorism’ (p.152-53). With regard to the notion of ‘pre-emption’ frequently used by the Bush administration, Fairclough agrees with Chomsky that American policy cannot be properly called a strategy of ‘pre-emptive war’, but rather a strategy of ‘preventive war’, which is not acceptable under international law. As a consequence, Fairclough warns, this terminological slant in GWOT discourse on the side of the war alliance could very easily start a new international arms race (p.154).

The media as carriers of a culture of fear In our comparative study of the 1991 Gulf War, we found that the domestication of global news, in the frame of a perspective greatly influenced by the U.S. version of events, played an important role in the overall framing of the Gulf War story (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2001). If we draw a parallel to the global coverage of 9/11, we see that national presentation of local threat is a common feature in many countries, including the case of Norway (Ottosen & Figenschou 2007). Medialisation of threat policies, as well as of politics in general, implies that the media and journalists are increasingly implicated in, and increasingly function as bearers of the culture of fear. For example, both terrorists and their opponents in the Global War on Terror employ media management strategies in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the general public. However, professional journalists and media companies generally lack effective counter-strategies to these attempts to exploit news journalism’s strong preference for spectacular, dramatic and threatening news backed by corresponding visual images. The role of the media in society has generally become more important, and this is particularly evident in relation to war and conflict, terrorism, and also with regard to risks and threats. Modern wars are waged as both military and media operations (Taylor 1997). For democratic countries engaged in military conflicts, support from the general public is the sine qua non for the mobilisation of the necessary resources, not to mention for victory. It can even be argued that without the media, ‘public opinion’ would be an oxymoron. Some wars can perhaps even be explained by the role of the media, if one considers the heavy media attention given to military conflicts and how this can be exploited to influence political situations and agendas. Was this factor not one of the most important behind the Bush administration’s decision to declare war after the 9/11 terror attacks – and for several reasons. First, war attracts media attention to a degree that would not otherwise occur; second, the wartime upsurge in loyalty and patriotism is a great political asset for the current government; and third, not only do journalists tolerate restrictions on human rights during wars, they even accept restrictions on their own activities. Modern terrorism is in fact nearly inconceivable without the communicative possibilities offered by modern mass media (cf. Klopfenstein 2006). It is obvious that the 9/11 terrorist attacks employed a media strategy of this kind. Both the timing and the targets suggest a ruthless calculation of how the media could be manipulated to further al-Queda aims. When it comes to somewhat less dramatic risks and threats, as, for example, global warming or bird flu, the mediation effects are no less. Political pro- grammes and defensive measures – either individual or collective – would be very different, if they were even possible, without media attention. But the role of the media cannot be properly understood unless we grasp central importance of the fear factor in the media economy. The exploitation of threats and risks is fundamental to news journalism as an institution. Exaggeration and premature warnings therefore pass by the gatekeepers on a daily basis. In relation to the authoritative scientific definition of risk, i.e., risk as a function of probabilities and consequences, the media usually only focus on the factor of consequences. Thus with regard to risk situations of the low probability and extreme consequences type, media logic tends toward worst possible scenario-reporting that may provoke serious problems leading to many kinds of anx- iety, excesses of emotional energy and wasteful resource expenditures. In connection with global warming phenomena – that incidentally have shifted in the Swedish media discourse from "risk" to "threat" – the role of the media is vindicated almost to the edge of parody by a television meteorologist who has become a major influence on public opinion, as well as the host of a television series on the topic. As the key institution in a vibrant public sphere, the media’s receptivity to diverse risk and threat images makes it urgent to develop a high level of reflexivity and openness about this problem. But in that respect journalism suffers from an even more serious deficiency. The lack of critical investigative reporting on the threat perception management strategies that the media are exposed to is one of the greatest obstacles for enlightening the public about politics and opinion-building

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today. Rarely does one see journalists trying to dig beneath the surface of politically promoted risk and threat messages. The prime example is the mobilisation period before the 2003 Iraq war, when US media in general, and also several British media, failed in their watch-dog function and deceived large parts of their audiences into believing the accusations that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and had aided the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Only very few media bothered to publish any self- criticism when it soon became obvious that the official arguments for invading Iraq were misleading – the noticeable ex- ceptions being The New York Times and The Washington Post, which came out with excuses more than a year after the war started. Then US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a highly profiled speech in the UN Security Council, presenting what he claimed was proof of Iraqi guilt. He later called this event the darkest moment in his career. It would not be completely off the mark for many in the media to say something equally self-critical. In any case, media in other countries – with different political settings – had no special difficulties in finding experts and commentators who questioned the accuracy of the Bush and Blair administrations’ claims and thus framed their reports of the Security Council meeting in a more critical tone (Nohrstedt 2005). However, research findings indicate that even the American media displayed some degree of independence with respect to the Bush administration’s shifting GWOT rhetorical agenda. This happened when the White House, three weeks into the Iraq war, changed its focus from WMDs to toppling the tyrant in Baghdad. At White House and Pentagon briefings, the press corps kept the WMD focus, but whether that implies more critical reporting in the later stages of the "battle for Iraq" is not entirely clear (Clifton 2007:8). A special problem for the media is how to handle and critically scrutinise the trans-national processes of perception management, which have become increasingly important due to globalisation. One of the GWOT’s more striking characteristics is that the superpower that declared this unique war does not acknowledge any territorial, temporal, cultural, and probably not even any moral restrictions on its operations. Consequently, the trans-national dimensions of GWOT discourse are highly essential to how we should understand the impact of the medialisation of this discourse. With respect to the trans-national dimensions, the national outlook of the mainstream media is of course even more troubling, since many of the political, juridical and other consequences of the GWOT are trans-national, for example, the surveillance of travellers, fi- nancial transfers, migrants, etc. A case to mention is the CIA air flights carrying suspected terrorists between different countries and continents. Since these activities were approved by the affected countries, it took quite some time before they were brought to the general public’s attention. The story apparently only took off after some investigative journalists got in contact with a rather eccentric NGO whose members are fascinated by aircraft spotting everywhere in the industrial world. But it took years before the story hit the newsstands. Normally it is only when national-local politicians or other elite members raise objections against measures that, for example, impinge on civil and human rights that the media can be expected to engage in investigative research on an issue. For the rest, the mediated trans-national GWOT discourse will be situated within the horizons (Nohrstedt 2007a) of what is accepted by the economic, political, ideological, etc., interests that control the big international news providers. Amongst them American ownership and influence are substantial (McPhail 2002; cf. Fairclough 2006:171). But, and this is an important reservation, it is an empirical and open question as to what extent and in what ways trans-national discourses are re-contextualised when "crossing the borders" between different national-local settings. The implication is that it would be wrong to ignore the fact that the globalisation of the media fa- cilitates some steps toward the advent of a cosmopolitan public sphere (Fairclough 2006:171; cf. Beck 2006). In the next section, we will discuss changes in the international media landscape and the subsequent institutional conditions for the emergence of a reflexive, cosmopolitan discourse on the GWOT. Above we discussed in some detail Fairclough’s analysis of GWOT discourse, because we regard it as generally relevant and basically sound, as well as productive for analytical purposes. But our aim in including it in this article is not to accuse the news media of failing to employ this kind of analysis in their daily reporting. Our intention is instead to use it as a tool for discussing the institutional conditions of mainstream media when approaching a global discourse like that of the GWOT. Fairclough’s explication of this globally dominant discourse is useful for a diagnosis of what can and cannot be expected of the media. This can help to create a basis for future proposals on how and in what ways news journalism can be improved, both professionally and democratically. Let us sum up what conclusions follow from such an attempt to "measure" the status of ordinary news journalism in relation to the GWOT. 1. The contextual and re-contextualising perspective that emphasises the inter-discursive relation between the GWOT and previous discourses on globalism and the knowledge-based economy is notoriously absent in conventional news reporting. Reasons for this are, among others, that internationally in the mainstream media all discussions and references to hegemonic ambitions and strategies are regarded as views and not facts, and if not raised by the conventional sources, such as politicians and members of elites, are not considered even worth reporting. This also has a lot to do with what has been called "the epistemological horizon" of news journalism, namely the professional assumption of a transparent reality accessible through observation and interview techniques (Nohrstedt 2007a). But, in addition, the inter-discursive relations discussed by Fairclough are all located on a supra-national level related to policy-making in agencies like the World Bank, IMF and the G8 summits, and as such beyond the conventional national outlook of the mainstream media. Consequently these types of policies and powers are under-reported in the media. 2. Of the four themes mentioned by Fairclough, three are of a kind that has rarely – if ever – been challenged and scru-

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tinised by the news media. Without denying the existence of a few critical voices here and there, it is evident that the first three are aired again and again by the media. Basically this is because they are part of the political rhetoric of the remaining superpower and its allies, with their dominant position as news sources and agents in international politics. Hence, in this case the main explanatory factor is news value as understood and employed by the journalistic profession. In addition to this factor, there are shared interests between the hegemonic trans-national elites represented in the Bush administration and in the international media, such as CNN, BBC World, and so on. 3. The only theme that has been opened up for public scrutiny and discussion seems to be the fourth, i.e., the claims by the Bush and Blair administrations that they were the forces of "good" acting on moral grounds in international politics. Here one can note that this critical attitude is not primarily found in the mainstream media in the USA, but rather in the media of other countries. The main explanation is that leading politicians in, for example, France, Ger- many and Russia, objected to the military intervention strategy promoted by the US and the UK. In their respective countries’ media this opposition received a lot of attention, which further contributed to a radically different framing of coverage than in, for example, the mainstream US media (Nohrstedt 2007b). 4. When it comes to the semantic means, it goes without saying that the vague and unspecific usage of the terrorist label has been repeated uncritically by most mainstream media, both in the USA and in Europe. It has furthermore been exploited in political disputes as a convenient rhetorical weapon to create sympathy for a wide range of superpower policies. Even in situations where such support would be difficult to obtain, as in the Balkans, and for policies of ‘otherism’ and the exclusion of Muslims, the terrorism theme is appropriated in attempts to legitimise such specific local policies (Erjavec & Volcic 2006). Due to the news value mechanism mentioned above, the notion of "pre-emptive" war has certainly also penetrated the media very extensively. But, we might add, in this case it has not been appropriated to the same extent for local use, mindful of the escalation in the Middle East in connection with the Ira- nian nuclear programme and the ongoing conflict in Lebanon. Once again, the main explanation is that the represen- tatives of other nation states have "balanced" the US influence on the media outside the USA. One can probably also conclude that the terrorism concept, as well as the GWOT concept that the Bush administration frequently and immediately attached to the 9/11 attacks, and for very good reasons, was far easier to accept worldwide than the related concept of "pre-emptive war." In part this is because the former terms were linked to horrifying assaults against innocent civilians, whereas the latter is linked to a controversial US security strategy. And it is also in part because the latter was introduced into US rhetoric at a later stage than the former, after the first traumatic shock effects had worn off. If this were a first attempt to assess the institutional shortcomings of news journalism in relation to GWOT discourse, we would want to avoid the impression of a totally gloomy situation with nothing good to expect from news journalism as regards conflict resolution and peace building. Let us very briefly – since these findings have been reported elsewhere – mention just three trends in Swedish war journalism, from the so-called Gulf War of 1990-91 to the 2003 Iraq War. Firstly, the media are giving increasing attention to the "true face" of war, i.e., to the suffering of civilian populations and civilian victims of warfare. Secondly, the conditions of war journalism are increasingly receiving attention and are the object of self-critical reflection. The involved parties’ attempts to manipulate reportage by more or less sophisticated means and propaganda strategies have to a certain degree become news material. This has led various media to express reservations about the reliability of their reporting and encouraged audiences to be more critical. Thirdly, visual material has been given an ever-increasing amount of space, which, however, has not been accompanied by greater reflexivity. Unlike the contents of texts, the contents of visual material have not been subjected to the same critical scrutiny, and this has not produced warnings to media audiences (Nohrstedt 2007b). It is too early to tell whether these findings have more general or international relevance. But they may hypothetically be regarded as reasons for some optimism with regard to the media institution and its role in violent conflicts. What about the new media in this context? Will they change the balance in conflicts between media-management strategists and journalists? In the next section we will try to make a preliminary assessment.

New media – a global public sphere with increased pluralism and alternative discourses? The global mediascape has become more pluralistic, and new alternative media are challenging the mainstream media. Al Jazeera and other Arab broadcasters are competing with the dominant Western media on the global 24/7 (twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week) news market. Furthermore, the emergence of the Internet and different forms of information traffic, communication and debates has led to speculations and hopes for a more deliberative and more globalised public sphere. Let us comment on the different types of new media in a step-wise fashion. But first, an overall conclusion seems worth mention: The so-called marketplace of ideas has grown at a remarkable speed, with new "markets" of competition where dominance is challenged by newcomers, at the same time as previous success stories are continually being copied and modified with uncertain outcomes. To make a prognosis in this field is thus extremely difficult.

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The history of the trans-national media started of course long before the emergence of satellite television, cable systems and the Internet. Even before the news agencies there were print media that reached international audiences. But we will leave the historical part at that and concentrate on more recent developments, i.e., from 1989 onwards, with a special focus on media and international conflicts. It is common knowledge that the Gulf War of 1990-91 gave CNN a commercial breakthrough as the leading provider of international visual news. CNN was the first broadcaster to take full advantage of the skyrocketing demand for war images and had the resources to meet requests from national television companies all over the world. In Sweden, for example, the national news agency found that many of its clients switched to CNN for immediate live footage from war theatres. The dominance of US propaganda in media coverage internationally was massive, according to a number of studies made at the time (e.g., references in Nohrstedt & Ottosen 200I; Kempf & Luostarinen 2002). This cannot be explained merely as a CNN effect, because the international political situation and the fact that the UN had sanctioned the military intervention encouraged journalists and the general public to take a pro-alliance view. But CNN’s strong commercial position meant that the channel had an impact on the "media war" as waged on worldwide television screens. This conclusion stands in stark contrast to the media war over the 2001 Afghanistan war and the 2003 Iraq war. Al Jazeera had been established in the meantime and turned out to be a strong competitor for CNN, not only in the Arab world, but also internationally. With the unique accreditation to air footage from Kabul under the Taliban regime, the Quatar-based channel could provide visual news material highly valued in the international television market. In the Iraq war, the competition had increased even more, as well in the Arab speaking world, but together with other television channels in the region, Al Jazeera continued to be a strong competitor for CNN, BBC World, and other Western trans-national companies. Not least with the result that civilian suffering and innocent casualties received increased visual attention in television reports that resonated with the compassion discourse (Nohrstedt, Höijer & Ottosen 2002; Höijer 2004; Nohrstedt 2007b). In its Iraq war coverage, Al Jazeera was considerably more critical of the war than the major American television networks (Aday et al. 2005). However, the role of Al Jazeera is controversial. In the Middle East region it has been pointed to as the leading star guiding the way to rapid change in almost the entire television market (El-Bendary 2003; see also El-Bendary 2005), but also as a Trojan horse of the US and Israel, as well as an agency promoting a Pan-Arab public sphere (Sakr 2007). Leaving aside the impact of the Arab television channels, when comparing satellite-television channels with nationally relayed television channels, the research findings are not completely consistent. In one study the results indicate that "dominant" framing, i.e., standardised news from primary definers like politicians and other authoritative sources, is more or less equally fre- quent in satellite and in national television news reports (approximately every fifth item). But with regard to in-depth reportage, for example features in which different views are presented and discussed, satellite news are more generous (eight percent compared to four percent). Simon Cottle regards this somewhat hopefully, because it may indicate that the new media architecture supports a "politics of pity – or a politics of shame" (Cottle 2006:37). Since his results are not spec- ified for the different satellite channels (the group includes BBC World, CNN International, Fox News and Sky News Aus- tralia), the findings are hard to interpret. Another study reports contrary findings, i.e., that compared to national television channels in Canada and the USA, the cable channels CNN and Fox News were both "much more consistent with the Ad- ministration’s framing … Fox News, however, presented the Administration’s framing with unusual intensity in a number of ways" (Clifton 2007:20).This also seems to confirm the results of other studies of Fox News, showing the channel to be one of the strongest and most unabashed supporters of the war in Iraq (Aday et al. 2005). The Internet offers a number of facilities and formats for communication and news services that go beyond the usual one- way flow. Interactivity is technically speaking the most unique feature of many of these new media. But it is far from clear to what extent and for what purposes the new ICT is being used. Generally speaking, contrary to expectations, deliberative democratic communication has not flourished (Buskqvist 2007; cf. Hacker & van Dijk 1999). For war journalism the findings to date create an ambivalent picture. First, a study of what can be called hybrid media will be mentioned. In a study of Iraq war news on the home pages of The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Ahram and Al Jazeera, it was found that the "Arab media were clearly more critical of the war than the two Coalition newspapers," with the Quatar-based television channel much more critical than the Egyptian newspaper’s homepage (Dimitrova & Connolly-Ahern 2007:162, 164). In sum, the web pages did not differ from the pattern that would be expected had the study respectively compared the printed and televised versions. If we turn to representations of violent conflicts in the more unique forms of Internet-based information, like chat-rooms and blogs, the question remains as to what extent they are truly alternative media compared to conventional press, radio and television. From general re-mediation theory it would follow that new media and old media mutually influence each other in the permanent drive towards increased immediacy, leaving not much hope of dramatic shifts between different media generations (Bolter & Grusin 1999). This general conclusion also seems in fact to be confirmed when it comes to war reporting. Oliver Boyd-Barrett, for example, contends that alternative online news sources, e.g., blogs, may be important as counter-hegemonic media, although their roles are somewhat contradictory and uncertain. On the one hand, they "reframe" news stories which are first published in the mainstream media and in that way lend them new meaning and deprive them of their status and legitimacy. But on the other hand, the information in blogs depends so heavily on the mainstream news media as sources that these alternative online news sites may simply be contributing to the formers’

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dominant position (Boyd-Barrett 2007). And in the GWOT, the information warfare that has been going on in the traditional mass media has gained ground on the Internet, with terrorist activities and counter-terrorism being fought out electroni- cally. A multiplicity of information and sources, as well as reduced time frames as defining features of Internet communication on web pages and chat rooms, also seems to be gradually affecting the traditional news media, with the consequence that the gatekeeper function is diminishing (Klopfenstein 2006). In addition, large numbers of youth feel this is just "more of the same" and are turning their backs on traditional news media altogether (Ottosen 2007b). As an alternative they are seeking cultural and visual stimuli in entertainment and new digital media like computer games, films and interactivity in the blogosphere. Myspace and Youtube seem more interesting for millions of media users than BBC World, Fox news or Al Jazeera. Some of these new media offer a critique of the mainstream media and encourage general media reflexivity (Figenschou 2006). If journalism as pursued in the latter continues to be unable to meet these challenges, it might be marginalised altogether. It seems plausible that traditional journalism may not be able to manage, because it would require an entirely new professional epistemology than the one that has been its trademark so far, i.e., an epistemology assuming a completely transparent reality (Nohrstedt 2007a).

The power of visual images The visualisation of the media culture is another trend that confronts news journalism and media reflexivity with increased challenges. Terrorists as well as anti-terrorist organisations have improved their efforts and skills in managing the media by video, photo and other visual means. Governments and military organisations have, for example, been successful in developing visually based media strategies in times of crisis, through PR agencies, PSYOPS and disinformation. Through different kinds of visual spin techniques, power centres have been able to influence the journalistic framing of global events and the images of oppositional policies and movements. Visual components play a major role in PSYOPS (Psychological Operations). We will offer a few examples to clarify this. It is obvious that there is a combination of visual persuasion and organised PSYOPS campaigns to influence the news agenda. We can see this with regard to the dismantling of the Saddam statue when US forces entered Bagdad, with regard to the so-called "rescue" of Jessica Lynch during the ground offensive in Iraq, and to the attempt to link the alleged threat from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with the attack on Fallujah in November 2004 (Eide and Ottosen 2006). Before offering analyses of these empirical cases, we will underline the importance of pictures and other visual elements in the news agenda (based on Ottosen 2007). One reason to put more emphasis on the visual aspects of journalism is simply that we remember visual impressions better than verbal ones (Magnussen and Greenlee 1998). We view pictures in the same way we view the world in general. We tend to accept what we see as true (Klaren 1996; in Eide 2005). Daniel Gilbert concludes that "people believe the ideas they comprehend as quickly and automatically as they believe the objects they see" (Gilbert 1991; quoted from Eide 2005). Research on how the brain decodes pictures also shows that it matters how pictures are arranged in page layouts. We remember better and place more weight on pictures on the left-hand side of a page. Rudolf Arnheim expresses it this way: "The left side is endowed with special weight; it assumes the function of a strong centre with which the viewer tends to identify" (Arnheim 1988). Susan Sontag suggests that press photographs even have a "deeper bite" than movies or television, since they "freeze-frame" events in a single image: "in an area of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form of memorizing it" (Sontag 2003; quoted from Artz 2004:81). Pictures, cartoons and other visual elements play an important role in creating enemy images, which is an important part of propaganda in war journalism (Ottosen 1995). The acrimonious debate on the Mohammed caricatures published in Jyl- lands-Posten provoked a global controversy about freedom of expression, intercultural relations and religious tolerance (Ot- tosen 2007). Since visual persuasion takes a shortcut to our emotions (Eide 2005), the presence of visual elements should play a more important role in the debate on peace journalism. Sometimes the absence of pictures is also a problem, since modern journalism, especially television, depends on pictures to tell a story. First of all, we thus have to acknowledge that without pictures or other visual elements most stories would never surface in the news. A lack of visual representations has kept important conflicts outside the news agenda in the mainstream Western press in such cases as East Timor, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia and Zaire (Zelizer 2004:116). Michael Griffin underlines the importance of visual images in the framing of stories in an essay comparing the use of photographs in news magazines’ coverage of wars like the 1991 Gulf War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Griffin 2004). He relies on an analysis of the US news magazines Time, Newsweek and US News & World Reports for his conclusions. Thus Griffin emphasises that a photographic image in itself does not create an awareness of human suffering and empathy with the victims of war. Representational legitimacy remains tied to power, and visual images in the mainstream media are more likely to produce enduring symbols of mainstream discourse than to give us alternative perspectives (ibid.: 400).

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The framing of a story in television news depends on what photos are available, but the same footage can be inserted in quite different frames. During the attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001, the BBC filmed desperate Afghan refugees in camps and later sold the images to ABC. The US broadcaster changed the framing of the story and blamed the Taliban rather than the US bombing for their desperate situation (Miller 2007: 85-86).

First case: the rescue of Jessica Lynch The Jessica Lynch story has been used to show the blurred line between fact and fiction in war propaganda (Ottosen 2004). The story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US Special Forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. The propaganda story turned out to be pure fiction. She was not wounded in battle, but rather was injured in a car accident. For a PSYOPS operation, how she was hurt was irrelevant. The point was to frame the story to distract from the problems with the war and to avoid evoking the Vietnam syndrome. If we look at the foreign news pages in Verdens Gang (VG) on April 2, 2003, the day the Jessica Lynch story broke, we find a double page in VG’s first edition under the headline: "A whole family wiped out." A huge photo showed an emotionally overwhelmed man, Kazem Mohammed, together with several corpses in a coffin. We learn from the story that his entire family had been killed by bombs dropped in an American air raid. This was a rare moment when civilian casualties were in the forefront of VG’s coverage. On the same day, VG published a second edition. By then, the spin story of Jessica Lynch had broken. In the second edition, the story of Kazem Mohammed was reduced to a much shorter piece. The picture of the crying Mohammed is now quite small, and one of the pictures of his family in the coffin has disappeared. Most of the space on the double page is now occupied by the joyful face of Jessica Lynch under the headline: "Prisoner of war Jessica (19) free." In the story, Pentagon sources explain the "rescue-operation" and add that the past few days have been used to hunt for Ali Hassan al-Majd, "the man who in 1988 allegedly was behind the gassing of 5000 Kurds in North-Iraq." The contrast between the beautiful, seemingly innocent Jessica and the bestial Hassan al-Majd bears all the marks of a PSYOPs operation (Eide and Ottosen 2006). The conflict between good and evil is established, and the new framing draws attention away from the civilian casualties in the first edition. The combination of enemy images and visual attention to the attractive female soldier is also interesting in a gendered perspective (Lippe 2006). There is a striking contrast between the bestial image of Ali Hassan al-Majd and the appealing young woman representing the US armed forces, which were nevertheless responsible for the death of Kazem Mohammed’s family. And here we touch the core of perception management. The intention with PSYOPS is to establish positive connotations for the US presence and to demonize "the others." In this respect, the attempt to create links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida, and to link many different forms of resistance to al-Qaida, is an essential element.

Second case: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Fallujah In an earlier study, Rune Ottosen analyzed VG’s coverage of Fallujah (Ottosen 2007). Based on that study, we will look more closely at the PSYOPS operation during the attacks on Fallujah in November 2004 and show how the purpose of the operation was to establish a justification for the attack that left Fallujah in ruins with thousands of civilian casualties. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by US forces in May 2006, has been portrayed by both the Bush administration and the Western media as the mastermind behind the "insurgency" in Iraq, which was allegedly responsible for the massacres of Iraqi civilians. The Bush administration, in official statements, including presidential speeches, national security documents, etc., has repeatedly asserted the need to "go after" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden and other alleged al-Qaida contacts (Chossudovsky 2006). The Washington Post revealed that the role of al-Zarqawi had been deliberately "magnified" by the Pentagon to build support for the US War on Terror (ibid.). The senior commander responsible for the Pentagon’s PSYOPS operations was Brig- adier General Mark Kimmitt, a deputy director at the US Central command (CENTCOM), which directs operations in Iraq and Middle East. He revealed to The Washington Post the existence of a plan to link al-Zarqawi to the "insurgency" in Fal- lujah. It has been shown that part of the PSYOPS campaign was based on invented stories that claimed detailed plans for terror attacks had been found on al-Zarqawi’s computer. Disinformation and war propaganda are an integral part of military planning. What the Washington Post failed to mention was its own role in sustaining the al-Zarqawi legend. Disinformation regarding the War on Terror has been fed into the news chain through PSYOPS and information campaigns in an attempt at "perception management." In Fallujah, the siege of the city, which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, was described as a battle against the "Zarqawi network." The Washington Post distributed the false information from the PSYOPS campaign without informing its readers. This PSYOPS operation obviously had an influence on the coverage in VG. Returning to the theoretical work by Rudolph Arnheim presented earlier in the paper, Arnheim made a point of the fact that it is easier to remember pictures placed on the left-hand side of a page. It can be argued that editing the page in this manner encourages us to see the war from a U.S. perspective (Arnheim 1988).

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The pictures in the story and the subtitles connote fanaticism and defeat. The fighters look like bank robbers, but are doomed to lose (because they are too few). A small picture of the alleged rebel leader al-Zarqawi is placed under the fighters, linking them visually. The enemy image of al-Zarqawi as the key al-Qaeda figure in Iraq is essential here. If we look at the text more closely, we find that even though the lead of the article states that, "Thousands of American soldiers stormed the streets of Fallujah," the title, including the expression "bloodbath," refers to the rebels. A statement from the "feared" al-Zarqawi tells us that: "Let us stand up with all our power and use all that is dear to us when we fight them." The rebels also get the blame for potential civilian casualties when Iraq expert Michael O’Hanlon is quoted as fearing that "al-Zarqawi and his men will use many thousands of civilians in the city as living shields." The US soldiers are let off the hook as to responsibility for any civilian casualties, since they are solely targeting the rebels: "Last night the heavens over Fallujah were lit up, while overwhelming military power hammered away at the rebels" (VG November 9 2004, quoted from Ottosen 2007). Instead of explaining the broad potential for resistance, VG narrowed it further by ending the article with the information that the force of between 1000 and 1500 is headed by Omar Hadid, and the force contains radical Muslims from Syria and Jordan. Hadid’s group is linked to al-Qaida’s "top man" in the region, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Here it is implied that the resistance is made up of "foreigners" with links to international terrorism. The operation named "Dawn" could, according to VG, turn into the fiercest street battle the Americans had fought since the Vietnam War and the battle over the town of Hue at the time. VG portrays the resistance as "a desperate and sometimes invisible enemy that knows the city and every house as well as its own pocket." Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is quoted as saying that the purpose of the battle was to "strangle the rebellion in Iraq once and for all. And to clear the ground for the elections in January." The rhetoric in the quotes from Rumsfeld includes all the signs of propaganda: "Suc- cess in Fallujah will be a setback for the terrorists in the country," said Rumsfeld during his press conference at the Penta- gon yesterday. At that time 42 rebels had been killed. To balance this, VG quotes a doctor in Fallujah who, according to AP, told of about 12 civilian casualties and 17 wounded, among them a five-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy. In his speech, Rumsfeld uses a "job" metaphor to describe the attack. This is uncritically used by VG in its story. The quotes were: "This is a difficult job," however, this time Rumsfeld promises "to complete the job and not stop the way the Americans did in April." Referring to war with a "job" metaphor is common in war propaganda (Luostarinen and Ottosen 2002). A more detailed explanation would be to contextualise the November massacres against the background of the failed operations in Falujah in April of the same year. That would indicate a possible hidden agenda of revenge for the humiliation that U.S. soldiers suffered at that time. To quote a story from the same journalist on April 1, 2004: "The scenes from Fal- lujah were so grotesque that U.S. television viewers were shielded from the pictures. At least two bodies were dragged through the streets by a car. One body was dragged by its feet. The corpses were hung on telephone wires." The images of the corpses of U.S. soldiers were published in many Western media and were obviously humiliating for the U.S. Thus revenge could be seen as a hidden agenda in the attack six months later, but it was never dealt with in the Norwegian media coverage (Eide and Ottosen 2006).VG readers received little information about the situation facing the civilian population in Fallujah. Of course, this must be seen in the light of the circumstances in which these five articles were written. The Pentagon’s media strategy was to control access to information. It is not our intention to moralise about the journalists at VG, but, still, in retrospect it is intriguing to see what was missing in these articles and, interestingly enough, British newspapers such as The Guardian were able to print critical articles about Fallujah with many pictures to underline the massive destruction. So the information was available soon afterwards for those who wanted it (based on Ottosen 2007). The Guardian printed a fully illustrated supplement on January 11, 2005 – to our mind an effective example of peace journalism, since it used photos to document the massive destruction of the city and the consequences for the civilian population. Iraqi medical doctor and writer Al Fadhil entered the city on December 24 and documented the effects of the war through diaries and photos. He talked to the remaining civilians, who blamed both the US forces and the resistance fighters, who didn’t care about their fates and their ruined city. He viewed the city centre on December 24 and wrote: "By 10 a.m. we were inside the city. It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a ghost town" (Fadhil: 2005). Using photographs, he documented destroyed mosques and ruined homes, corpses, derogatory slogans in English daubed on bathroom mirrors. There is thus a striking contrast between The Guardian, which chose to find available alternative sources to document the horrors of war, and VG, with its conventional use of PSYOPS based information distributed by elite sources, which had the aim to draw attention away from the civilian casualties and the horrors of war.

Peace journalism as a strategy of reflexive and conscious journalism? Peace journalism has been proposed as an alternative journalistic programme. It relates to dissident voices in opposition to the naivety of conventional, uncritical war journalism and peace and conflict research. As a professional credo, peace

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journalism has developed counter-strategies and an alternative agenda. The basic idea is to escape from the war propaganda trap of symbolically constructing armed conflicts as polarised, black and white, zero-sum games. However, precisely this form of representation and storytelling is the staple stuff of the journalistic profession, and it cannot be easily replaced. If the traditional media themselves are unable to transmit alternative perspectives and voices, the danger is that those segments of the global village that feel marginalised will turn to terror in order to make a difference in the media agenda. Peace journalism, as proposed by Johan Galtung (2002), defines war as a problem in itself and promotes non-violence as a means of conflict resolution. Galtung’s model builds on the dichotomy and contrast between what he calls ‘war journalism’ and the ‘peace journalism’ approach. Peace journalism has inspired individual journalists to look for alternative framing in a news environment highly influenced by propaganda and PSYOPS, but the question is whether this is enough to have an overall impact on the global news agenda, where such forces play a strong role in shaping the cultural and political atmosphere (Miller 2007). Galtung’s model includes four main points with which he contrasts the two approaches: war journalism is violence-oriented, propaganda-oriented, elite-oriented and victory-oriented. This approach is often linked to a zero-sum game where the winner (as in sports journalism) takes all. This is a prototype of what one could call traditional mainstream war coverage, without journalists reflecting on the fact that media itself play a role in conflict, often escalating conflicts by reproducing propaganda developed by the combatants as part of their media strategies and PR campaigns (based on Ottosen 2007). The peace journalism approach assumes a moral and ethical point of departure, acknowledging the fact that media themselves play a role in the propaganda war, intentionally or unintentionally. The peace journalism approach may make a conscious choice to identify alternative options for readers/viewers by offering a solution-oriented, people-oriented and truth- oriented approach. This means focusing on possibilities for peace that the conflicting parties may have an interest in hiding. Peace journalism is people-oriented in the sense that it focuses on victims (often civilian casualties) and thus gives a voice to the voiceless. It is also truth-oriented, in the sense that it reveals untruth on all sides and focuses on propaganda as another means of conducting war (Galtung 2002: 261-270). In their book Peace Journalism (2005), Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick have further developed Galtung’s model and transformed it into a practical tool for journalists. They have themselves been employing the model in media such as SKY and BBC. They offer an analytical model in the form of techniques for how to practice peace journalism, illustrated with examples from their own journalistic practice. They argue that the peace journalism option accepts that every war takes place in an atmosphere of propaganda in which the parties often present confrontation as the only alternative. By pointing in the direction of a peaceful solution, journalists can offer their audience a broader perspective on a given conflict by using the "insights of conflict analyses and transformation to update the concepts of balance, fairness and accuracy in reporting" (Lynch and McGoldrick 2005:5). They see the potential of peace journalism as the provision of a road map "tracing the connections between journalists, their sources, the story they cover and the consequences of their journalism" and what they call the "ethics of journalistic intervention" (ibid.). In summary, their ambition is to introduce an "awareness of non- violence and creativity into the practical job of everyday editing and reporting" (ibid.). Peace Journalism can be seen as a normative mode of responsible and conscientious coverage of conflict that aims at contributing to peacemaking, peacekeeping, and changing the attitudes of media owners, advertisers, professionals, and audiences towards war and peace (Shinar 2007). Shinar maintains that Peace Journalism criticizes media preferences for violence, simple descriptions, combatants, conflict, "sport-like situations" and lack of interest in peace-related stories and topics. In contrast, Shinar suggests a focus on: 1. Exploring the backgrounds and contexts of conflict formation and presenting causes and options on every side so as to portray conflict in realistic terms, transparent to audiences; 2. Giving voice to the views of all rival parties; 3. Offering creative ideas for conflict resolution, peacemaking, peacekeeping and development; 4. Exposing lies, cover-up attempts and the culpable on all sides, revealing the excesses committed by, and the suffering inflicted on, people of all parties; 5. Paying more attention to peace stories and post-war developments than to regular coverage of conflict; 6. Promoting realistic and judicious attitudes with respect to the success that Peace Journalism may have in overcoming resistance and rejection, as well as criticizing excessive enthusiasm on the part of Peace Journalism supporters (Shinar 2007).

Preliminary conclusions We have developed some ideas in this paper that can serve as a point of departure for the further discussion of the conditions for creating a suitable national news agenda in a globalised media environment (e.g., Lynch & McGoldrick 2005). Given the theoretical points of departure and the empirical observations mentioned above, it seems important to consider

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the extent to which the peace journalism model (PJ) is suitable for facing the present global situation. Even though peace journalism can offer a working tool for individual journalists in chaotic newsrooms, we raise the question of whether this is enough to change a global news agenda highly influenced by PSYOPS and perception management. The findings presented here using examples from the war in Iraq in general, and during the fighting in Fallujah in particular, call for a greater focus on how journalists and media researchers should meet these challenges. Supported by recent literature, we suggest that the capability of power circles in the military industrial complex to influence the global news agenda through PR techniques and perception management is much greater than has been supposed up to now (Schechter 2006). We would suggest that the following additional problems be discussed further: Assuming that it is correct to state, as we have done in this article, that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has much more encompassing effects than any previous war – even compared to the so-called ‘new wars’ – the peace journalism strategy seems deficient in a number of ways. It focuses on situations of military violence and how they are reported, i.e., it is re- markably content oriented, instead of focusing on polarisation and mobilising processes, including threat policymaking, which eventually may lead to open violence. In this respect, PJ could probably learn from crisis communication research, which focuses more on the processes and mechanisms that explain the emergence of crises. Since both terrorism and counter-terrorism are nurturing a culture of fear, both internationally and domestically, it may be more suitable to examine the role of the media to try to find the kind of cultural and sense-making activities that tend to create a shift away from the Risk-Society and the Threat-Society. 1. Overall, our reflections, based on Fairclough’s analysis of GWOT discourse and the previously mentioned empirical observations on the Iraq war, indicate that the media alone are able to resist threat-policy strategies to only a very limited extent – or not at all. The main reasons for this conclusion, mentioned above, are: 1) the narrow nationalistic outlook of mainstream journalism; 2) the professional epistemology that assumes a transparent reality; and 3) journalism’s lack of reflexivity when it comes to visual material. Due to these and perhaps also to lesser factors, rather than expecting journalism and the media in general to resist threat-policies, it seems that media logic in many ways provides the means or mechanisms with which such policies can be easily pursued, and with great success, event- driven, sensationalism, immediacy, etc. – by strategists who are competent to master them. 2. The conflict resolution activities and PJ courses and seminars offered by NGOs or journalism schools are certainly very important for resistance to the proliferation of threat-policies. But it seems to us that they are too media-centred and that something equivalent to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute or the Norwegian Peace Research Institute is needed in the media sector in order to counter the increasingly threatening features of the GWOT discursive order. In combination with a UN based early warning system for new, upcoming media waves of threat-policy, such institutional reforms might turn the tide of the fear culture engulfing the news media in late modernity. In relation to the UN policy for democratisation, with its focus on elections and legal reforms in authoritarian countries, such a media monitoring institute could fill a gap in attempts to support democracy and human rights using journalistic means.

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About the authors: Stig Arne Nohrstedt, Ph.D is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Örebro, Sweden. His Research areas include war and conflict journalism, journalistic ethics and roles, risk and crisis communication and media and structural discrimination. Recent books: Nohrstedt, S.A. & Ottosen, R. (eds.) (2005): Global War – Local Views: Media Images of the Iraq War. Gö- teborg: Nordicom; Nohrstedt, S.A. & Ottosen, R. (eds.) (2004): US and the Others. Göteborg: Nordicom. eMail: [email protected]

 2008 by verlag irena regener berlin 17

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Wassilios Baros Bildung und Überprüfung von Hypothesen in der Migrationsforschung

Am Beispiel der aktuellen Debatte über Sprache und Integration von Minderheiten wird der Frage nach dem Zusammenspiel zwischen Gegenstandsverständnis, Wissensideal und Erkenntnisinteresse in der Migrationsforschung nachgegangen. Dabei wird die These vertreten, dass in einer mainstream-orientierten Forschungspragmatik, in deren Rahmen die Kontrolle von Bedingungen und Effekten menschlichen Verhaltens vordergründig ist, Fragen nach den Aufgaben der jeweiligen Wissensbildung in den Hintergrund geraten. Im Unterschied zu einem Bedingungsdiskurs in welchem der technischen Verwertbarkeit von Wissensbildung für die Begründung der Angemessenheit des je eigenen Ansatzes eine entscheidende Rolle zukommt wird hier die Notwendigkeit eines auf die Gewinnung emanzipatorischen Reflexionswissens abzielenden Erkenntnisinteresses für die Migrationsforschung herausgearbeitet und die Relevanz des Capabilities-Approach für eine Neuorientierung in der Interkulturellen Forschung und Bildung begründet.

Volltext (in Deutsch)

Zum Autor: Baros, Wassilios, Dr. paed., Hochschullehrer für Interkulturelle Bildung und Erziehung an der Demokritos Universität (Griechenland); Kooperationspartner des Bielefeld Center for Education and Capability Research; Lehrbeauftragter für interkulturelle Bildungsforschung, Universität zu Köln. Arbeitsgebiete: Interkulturelle Kommunikation und Konfliktforschung, Interkulturelle Bildung, qualitative Sozialforschung, Migration und Capabilities. eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Wassilios Baros Construction and Testing of Hypotheses in Migration Research

Using the example of the current and topical debate on language and the integration of minorities, the author examines the interaction between subject understanding, knowledge ideals and the epistemological interest in migration research. He thereby maintains that the respective tasks of knowledge development tend to fade into the background of mainstream-oriented research pragmatics, which focuses chiefly on controlling the conditions and effects of human behavior. In contrast to a discourse of conditions in which the technical utilizability of knowledge plays a decisive role in the justification of the methodological approach employed the author emphasizes the need for an epistemological interest in the acquisition of emancipatory reflective knowledge. He elaborates the relevance of the capabilities approach for a new orientation in migration research, intercultural studies and education.

full text (in German)

On the author: Wassilios Baros, Dr. ped., is Senior Lecturer for Intercultural Education at Democritos University (Greece); Cooperation Partner of the Bielefeld Center for Education and Capability Research (Germany) and Visiting Lecturer for Intercultural

Educational Research at the University of Cologne (Germany). His research areas include intercultural communication and conflict research, intercultural education, qualitative social research, migration and capabilities. eMail: [email protected]

conflict & communication online, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008 www.cco.regener-online.de ISSN 1618-0747

Wassilios Baros Bildung und Überprüfung von Hypothesen in der Migrationsforschung – Zum Verwertungszusammenhang von wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen am Beispiel des Neo-As- similationsansatzes in der Bilingualismusdebatte

Wilhelmine M. Sayler zum 80. Geburtstag

Abstract: Using the example of the current and topical debate on language and the integration of minorities, the author examines the interaction between subject understanding, knowledge ideals and the epistemological interest in migration research. He thereby maintains that the respective tasks of knowledge development tend to fade into the background of mainstream-oriented research pragmatics, which focuses chiefly on controlling the conditions and effects of human behavior. In contrast to a discourse of conditions – in which the technical utilizability of knowledge plays a decisive role in the justification of the methodological approach employed – the author emphasizes the need for an epistemological interest in the acquisition of emancipatory reflective knowledge. He elaborates the relevance of the capabilities approach for a new orientation in migration research, intercultural studies and education.

Kurzfassung: Am Beispiel der aktuellen Debatte über Sprache und Integration von Minderheiten wird der Frage nach dem Zusammenspiel zwischen Gegenstandsverständnis, Wissensideal und Erkenntnisinteresse in der Migrationsforschung nachgegangen. Dabei wird die These vertreten, dass in einer mainstream-orientierten Forschungspragmatik, in deren Rahmen die Kontrolle von Bedingungen und Effekten menschlichen Verhaltens vordergründig ist, Fragen nach den Aufgaben der jeweiligen Wissensbildung in den Hintergrund geraten. Im Un- terschied zu einem Bedingungsdiskurs – in welchem der technischen Verwertbarkeit von Wissensbildung für die Begründung der Ange- messenheit des je eigenen Ansatzes eine entscheidende Rolle zukommt – wird hier die Notwendigkeit eines auf die Gewinnung emanzipatorischen Reflexionswissens abzielenden Erkenntnisinteresses für die Migrationsforschung herausgearbeitet und die Relevanz des Capabilities-Approach für eine Neuorientierung in der Interkulturellen Forschung und Bildung begründet

1. Kritik an der deutschen Migrantenforschung in den 80er Jahren Bildung und Überprüfung von Hypothesen in der Migrantenforschung – so die zentrale These von Tsiakalos (1982) – stehen in engem Zusammenhang mit dem Charakter der Forschung selbst und der fehlenden Primärerfahrung des Sozialforschers in seinem Untersuchungsbereich. Seine Argumentation bezog sich u.a. auf folgende Aspekte, die für unsere weiteren Dar- legungen von Interesse sein werden: Migrantenforschung als Auftragsforschung zu administrativen Zwecken: Migrantenforschung orientiere sich zunehmend am Informationsbedarf der politischen und administrativen Praxis und nicht an den eigentlichen Problemen der untersuchten Gruppe (vgl. ebd., 29). Die beteiligten Wissenschaften hätten den Auftrag, möglichst rasch eine effektive Lösung des ‚Aus- länderproblems‘ herbeizuführen. Die unmittelbare Folge dieses übereilten Vorgehens sei es, dass Forschung betrieben wurde, bevor die in die Migrantenforschung involvierten Wissenschaften ein eigenes Erkenntnisinteresse entwickeln konnten. Trivialitätenproduktion in der Forschung und die Gefahr der Instrumentalisierung von wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen: Die Ergebnisse wissenschaftlicher Studien stellten oft nur allgemeines Wissen dar. Die auf dieser Grundlage formulierten Interventionsvorschläge seien stark von der jeweiligen Einstellung der Forscherin/des Forschers zum untersuchten Problem und zur untersuchten Gruppe gefärbt. Wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse zu gewinnen, die bereits zum gesicherten Wissen der Allgemeinheit gehören, sei an sich nicht schädlich. Problematisch werde es jedoch dann, wenn Forscher(innen) die Auf- gabe der Wissensbildung lediglich mit Blick auf die technische Verwertbarkeit von Erkenntnissen definierten, ihr wissen- schaftliches Handeln an einem bestimmten Informationsbedarf orientierten und sich berechtigt fühlten, auf der Basis ihrer Ergebnisse (pädagogische) Praxisvorschläge zu unterbreiten (vgl. ebd., 34). Vorbehalt in Bezug auf die Notwendigkeit intensiven methodischen Aufwandes: Manche Ergebnisse seien so selbstver- ständlich, ja nahezu trivial, dass man sich mit guten Gründen veranlasst fühle, ernsthaft über den Sinn der Verwendung hochelaborierter methodischer Verfahren nachzudenken. Diese Problematik wird (auch) am Beispiel einer in den 70er Jah- ren durchgeführten Untersuchung über die Assimilationsbedingungen von Arbeitsmigrant(inn)en veranschaulicht und ab- schließend wie folgt kommentiert: "Denn es ist selbstverständlich, dass jeder sich die Sprache am schnellsten aneignet, der die Fähigkeit und die Motivation und die Möglichkeit dazu hat, und am langsamsten jener, dem alle drei Bedingungen fehlen" (ebd., 34). Starker Einfluss axiomatischer Überzeugungen auf Hypothesenbildung und -überprüfung: Stereotype Vorstellungen von der vermeintlich mangelnden Handlungs- und Entscheidungsfreiheit der Migrant(inn)en sowie deren angeblicher Unfähigkeit, ihre Probleme und Konflikte im Gastland angemessen bewältigen zu können, flössen in Form axiomatischer Überzeugungen in den Forschungsprozess ein. Kulturell bedingte Defizite im Denken und Handeln der Migrant(inn)en würden bereits in der Anlage der Untersuchungen konstruiert und zirkulär bestätigt (ebd., 56). Fehlende Primärerfahrung der Wissenschaftlerin/des Wissenschaftlers mit den untersuchten Gruppen: Verfügten For- scher(innen) nicht über diese Primärerfahrung, so seien sie weder in der Lage, unregelmäßig zustande gekommene Anga- ben in ihren Forschungsprozessen aufzudecken, noch sich vor der Produktion recht bedeutungsloser Zusammenhänge und der Formulierung falscher Interpretationen zu schützen (ebd., 39). Der präzis aufgebaute Beitrag von Tsiakalos war seinerzeit als Plädoyer für die Entwicklung eines im Sinne der Mig- rant(inn)en problemorientierten Eigeninteresses der Sozialwissenschaften zu verstehen. Von Migrationsforscher(inne)n wurde mehr Sensibilität gefordert, insbesondere in jenen Bereichen, in denen sozialwissenschaftliche Konzepte politische Maßnahmen unmittelbar nach sich ziehen.

2. Fünfundzwanzig Jahre danach: Rethinking Assimilation und Voraussetzungen für eine gelingende Le- bensführung im Migrationskontext Im Sinne des Assimilationskonzeptes werden gegenwärtig pädagogische Interventionsvorschläge erarbeitet, die darauf abzielen, Voraussetzungen für eine gelingende Lebensführung von Migrant(inn)en zu schaffen. Vertreter dieses Ansatzes (Brubaker 2001; Alba/Nee 1999, Esser 2003) gehen davon aus, dass die kulturellen Vorgaben des Aufnahmekontextes nach wie vor eine zentrale Bedeutung bei der Vermittlung von generell verwendbarem Humankapital hätten, die wiederum Vor- aussetzung für die Vermittlung von Chancen der strukturell verankerten Inklusion seien. Die Orientierung der Mig- rant(inn)en an den sozial und kulturell gültigen Erwartungen des jeweiligen Einwanderungskontextes sei eine unverzichtbare Voraussetzung für deren gelingende Lebensführung. Assimilation meint die Angleichung der verschiedenen Gruppen in bestimmten Aspekten (z.B. im Sprachverhalten oder in der Einnahme beruflicher Positionen). Diese Form der Angleichung ist nach Esser (1998) deshalb notwendig, weil den Mig- rant(inn)en nach wie vor der Zugang zu den wirklich zentralen gesellschaftlichen Positionen fehle, von denen her erst eine wirkliche Integration erfolgen könne. "Nachhaltige Investitionen in den Zugang zur Kernkultur der Aufnahmegesellschaft" (ebd., 133) bildeten die wichtigste Voraussetzung für das Andocken an diese Positionen, wobei die wohl wichtigste Inves-

tition dafür die in eine weiterführende Bildung sei. Es entspreche den Interessen der Migrant(inn)en, "ihre Chancen da zu suchen, wo sie sind: In der Kernkultur und in den Kerninstitutionen des Aufnahmelandes" (ebd., 135). Individuelle Assimi- lation bilde einen Spezialfall der Sozial-Integration in bestehende soziale Systeme und lasse sich weiterhin unterscheiden in: kulturelle Assimilation (Spracherwerb), strukturelle Assimilation (Erwerb von Bildungsqualifikationen; Platzierung auf dem [primären] Arbeitsmarkt) und emotionale Assimilation (Identifikation mit den Verhältnissen im Aufnahmeland) (vgl. Esser 1980, 230ff.). Strukturelle Assimilation sei "die zentrale (notwenige, wenngleich nicht hinreichende) Bedingung sowohl einer nachhaltigen Sozial-Integration der Migranten, wie darüber dann, zur Vermeidung der letztlich unerwünschten Alternativen, wie die (dauerhafte) ethnische Schichtung, die ethnische Segmentation, der ethnische (Neo-)Feudalismus oder die Sozial-Desintegra- tion der Gesellschaft über ethnische Spaltungen und Konflikte" (Esser 2003, 19). Um die strukturelle Assimilation erreichen zu können, bilde die kulturelle Assimilation (also der Spracherwerb) die Hauptvoraussetzung. Schließlich gebe es "zur individuellen strukturellen Assimilation als Modell der intergenerationalen Integration keine (vernünftige) theoretische, empirische und auch wohl normative Alternative" (ebd., 20). Die Suche der Migrant(inn)en nach Aufstiegsmöglichkeiten in ethnischen Segmenten wird insofern als Mobilitätsfalle ange- sehen, als diese Chancen auf eine ethnische "Karriere" beschränkt blieben. Weitere Hindernisse für eine individuelle strukturelle Assimilation bildeten zum einen die fehlende eindeutige Motivation der Migrant(inn)en bei ihrer Entscheidung für Zukunftsalternativen und zum anderen die Tatsache, dass in ethnischen Gemeinden Investitionen in formale Bildungsab- schlüsse oft nicht favorisiert würden. Die sonstigen beobachtbaren Alternativen zur individuellen Assimilation (Marginalität, multiple Inklusion und individuelle Segmentation) stellten im Grunde unbeabsichtigte Folgen nicht-assimilativer Reaktionen seitens der Migrant(inn)en dar, die dann entstünden, wenn die für die strukturelle Assimilation nötigen Investitionen nicht möglich seien oder aber gele- gentlich auch nicht konsequent genug verfolgt würden (ebd., 12).

2.1 Empirische Migrationsforschung im Bedingungsdiskurs Die methodische Grundlage des Assimilationsansatzes nach Esser (1999) besteht in der um kognitive bzw. kulturelle Kom- ponenten erweiterten Variante des RC-Ansatzes. Bei situationslogischen Analysen im Modell der soziologischen Erklärung bilden die Logik der Situation (formuliert in den Brückenhypothesen), die Logik der Selektion (formuliert in der WE-Ent- scheidungstheorie) und die Logik der Aggregation (formuliert in der Ableitung der strukturellen Folgen und der Erzeugung neuer struktureller Situationen) die drei Elemente der Situationslogik. Die Wert-Erwartungstheorie wird dort einbezogen, wo es darum geht, die kausale Umsetzung der situativen Strukturvariablen in das Handeln der Akteure zu erfassen. Im Konzept der soziologischen Erklärung werden die Motive und das Wissen der Akteure immer als objektiv strukturiert be- trachtet. Die theoretische Verknüpfung zwischen den objektiven Parametern der Situation und den Erwartungen und Be- wertungen der Akteure erfolgt über die sog. Brückenhypothesen. Im Vordergrund der Analyse stehen die institutionellen Strukturen und die jeweiligen – oft unbeabsichtigten – strukturbildenden Folgen des "situationsgerechten" rationalen Han- delns der Akteure als makrosoziologische Gegebenheiten. In diesem Sinne gäbe es für die Migrant(inn)en so etwas wie eine objektive Situationslogik hin zur (strukturellen) Assimilation an die zentralen institutionellen Bereiche der Aufnahme- gesellschaft. Die Beachtung dieser Situationslogik liege letztlich im objektiven Interesse der Migrant(inn)en selbst. Die kon- traproduktiven Folgen individueller, "nicht assimilativer" Strategien werden – als Logik der Aggregation in Anlehnung an Popper – vor allem auf der Makro-Ebene gesucht: Ethnische Schichtung als (Spät-)Folge des Verzichts auf assimilative Bil- dungsinvestitionen, die ethnische Segmentation einer ökonomischen Enklave und danach eventuell einer institutionell voll- ständigen ethnischen Gemeinde als (Spät-)Folge der Gründung ethnischer Unternehmungen und Organisationen. Durch die Einbeziehung von Handlungstheorien werden in diesem Ansatzes individuelle und soziale Bedingungen individueller Präferenzen, Bewertungen, Überzeugungen und Erwartungen empirisch zugänglich. Das gleiche gilt für Handlungsre- sultate, Bilanz und Folgen bestimmter Verhaltenweisen. Fokussieren die Analysen die Lebensbedingungen der Akteure, so kann dieser soziologische Ansatz einen Beitrag zur Rekonstruktion der allgemeinen sachlich-sozialen Bedingungen des Han- delns von Migrant(inn)en leisten. Das Einfügen von Wert-Erwartungstheorien ist dabei der Versuch, handlungsrelevante Aspekte der Situation von Migrant(inn)en bzw. Prämissen für ihr Handeln zu definieren, um auf diese Weise bei den Erklä- rungen auch subjektiven Handlungsmomenten gerecht zu werden. Der Einschub von Wert-Erwartungstheorien als Verbin- dungsglieder "an einer, in der Tat gänzlich ‚unsoziologischen’ Stelle der kausalen Umsetzung der situativen Strukturvariab- len in das Handeln der Akteure" (Esser 1999, 253) stellt jedoch eine Vernachlässigung des Aspekts der Rationalität des Handelns aus der Sicht des Handelnden dar (Greve/Ohlemacher 1995, Maiers 1994). Die Brückenhypothesen zur Explikation der Logik der Situation enthalten nur die von "außen" definierten jeweils "typischen" und "relevanten" Situationsmerkmale, wobei die über das soziologische Erklärungsmodell ‚hinausgehende’ Subjektivität der Migrant(inn)en lediglich den Status "individueller Idiosynkrasien" (Esser 1999, 253) annimmt. Welche der allgemeinen Mi- lieubedingungen tatsächlich zur Situation für die Migrant(inn)en werden und welche Aspekte ihrer Situation aus ihrer Per- spektive und gemäß ihren subjektiven Lebensinteressen handlungsrelevant sind, kann nicht erfasst werden.

Der von diesem Ansatz favorisierte empirische Zugang lässt sich allgemein etwa folgendermaßen kennzeichnen: Es handelt sich um einen objektwissenschaftlichen Ansatz, der sich in einem Bedingungsdiskurs bewegt, in dem die Kontrolle des Ver- haltens von Migrant(inn)en ermöglicht wird. Dies geschieht nicht nomologisch-deduktiv, sondern tendenziell mittels eines statistisch-induktiven Erklärungsmodells durch Bedingungsvariation. Es wird also nicht nach den Ursachen des zu erklären- den Phänomens gesucht, sondern nach den Bedingungen, unter denen mit ihm wahrscheinlich zu rechnen ist (Kempf 2003, 68). Das Kontrollinteresse ist durchaus legitim, bedeutet aber eine Sichtweise von außen auf die Migranten und entspricht einem Erkenntnisinteresse1, das man – zugespritzt formuliert – in den Satz zusammenfassen kann: "Was kann man tun, damit wir (die Aufnahmegesellschaft) mit den Migranten weniger Probleme haben?". Durch die Einbeziehung von wert- erwartungstheoretischen Ansätzen wird diese Kontrolle effektiver und theoretisch besser verstanden. Die Unzulänglichkeit des assimilationstheoretischen Ansatzes wird erst begrifflich fassbar vor dem Hintergrund eines erweiterten Gegenstands- verständnisses, in dem nicht Fragen nach den Bedingungen im Vordergrund stehen, sondern solche, die subjektive Hand- lungsgründe der Migrant(inn)en fokussieren. Dieses Gegenstandsverständnis korrespondiert gleichzeitig mit einem Erkenntnisinteresse, welches auf die Gewinnung emanzipatorischen Reflexionswissens abzielt, etwa in der Form: "Was kön- nen wir als Migrant(inn)en tun, um mit unserem Leben im Migrationskontext besser zurechtzukommen?"

2.2 Zum ‚heimlichen Lehrplan’ des Assimilationsdiskurses: Die unreflektierte Überschreitung des soziologischen Erkenntnisinteresses und die Folgen für die pädagogische Praxis Bei einem Symposion, welches anlässlich der Emeritierung von Wilhelmine M. Sayler zu ihren Ehren am 3. Mai 1993 statt- fand, hielt Roberto Llaryora (1994) einen richtungsweisenden Vortrag über die unterschiedlichen Erkenntnisinteressen von Soziologie und Pädagogik am Beispiel der Migrationsforschung: Soziologie schaue eher rekonstruktiv, wobei soziologische Rekonstruktionen immer "Sinngebilde lebensweltlichen Zuschnitts" blieben und niemals ihren lebensweltlich-"hermeneu- tischen" Charakter verlören, und dies trotz aller methodischen und forschungsstrategischen Verfeinerungen. Den unterschiedlichen Akzentuierungen in soziologischen Rekonstruktionen gingen freilich Entscheidungsprozesse seitens der Forscher(inn)en voraus, die nicht unabhängig seien von "angestammten und oftmals wissenschaftlich tradierten Deutungs- modellen, zentralen gesellschaftlichen Mythen aufgrund lebenspraktischer Erfahrungen, historischer Vergewisserung oder verantwortungsorientierter Reflexion" (ebd., 37ff.). Pädagogik verbinde Rekonstruktion mit Konstruktion und sensibilisiere interventionsorientierend für zukünftige Handlungsmöglichkeiten. In der Migrationsforschung sei es die Aufgabe soziologischer Forschung, problematische Formen der Inklusion von Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund zu lokalisieren und eventuelle Hintergründe sowie Folgen zu durchleuchten. Im Sinne einer Kooperation zwischen Soziologie und Pädagogik könnte erziehungswissenschaftliche Forschung von dort aus erörtern, auf welche Weise problematische Formen der Inklu- sion in pädagogischen Feldern verankert sind und wie sie möglicherweise aufgefangen, verhindert oder anders bewältigt werden können. Besonders ertragreich für die Pädagogik sind soziologische Analysen, die sich bei Fragen der Inklusion von Migrant(inn)en eines solchen Modells bedienen, welches die Einbindung der Gesellschaftsmitglieder in die Sozietät unter einem emanzipatorischen, nicht objektifikatorischen Vorzeichen (Steiner-Khamsi 1992) favorisiert. Im Unterschied zur Soziologie stehen für die Pädagogik dialogische Prozesse im Vordergrund. Dass sich in pädagogischen Situationen Subjekte und nicht bloß Subjekte und Objekte gegenüber stehen, hat Wilhelmine Sayler – eine der ersten Prot- agonisten der Interkulturellen Pädagogik – für die Migrationsforschung bereits in den 70er Jahren formuliert und theoretisch sowie empirisch deutlich herausgearbeitet: Integrative Erziehung baue auf dem Prinzip des Dialogs auf und basiere auf einem emanzipatorischen Diskurs mit den Betroffenen, der als Gegensatz zu einem ,Herrschaftsdiskurs’ verstanden wird. Um kooperative soziale Beziehungen zwischen Einheimischen und Minoritäten zu ermöglichen, müsse Integration als ein Prozess aufgefasst werden, der von beiden Seiten ausgeht (Sayler 1980; 1987). Die angesprochene Subjekt-Subjekt- Beziehung ist bei der Thematisierung der Migrationsituation besonders zu berücksichtigen, weil in der Migrationsforschung stärker die Gefahr besteht, dass ein "Erziehungsobjekt postuliert wird, dem jegliche Subjektivität abgeht" (Llaryora 1994, 40). Diese Überlegungen zu den unterschiedlichen Erkenntnisinteressen von Pädagogik und Soziologie sind für unsere Problem- stellung bedeutungsvoll, weil man bei genauerer Auseinandersetzung mit dem Assimilationskonzept zunehmend erkennt, wie relevant dieser Ansatz für situationsadäquate pädagogische Interventionen ist: Zwar betont Esser (1999, 252), dass es bei der handlungstheoretischen Präzisierung seiner soziologischen Erklärung nicht darum geht, das Verhalten der "Indivi- duen", sondern die "Genese emergenter struktureller Effekte" zu untersuchen; formuliert aber dennoch auf der Grundlage soziologischer Rekonstruktionen unvermittelt pädagogisch relevante Forderungen (z.B. Förderung der deutschen Sprache auch in der Familie, Geringhaltung des Einreisealters, Vermeidung von ethnischen Konzentrationen etc.). Unvermittelt deshalb, weil die Formulierung solcher Forderungen immer auch eine Thematisierung intentionalen Handelns auf seine erzie-

1. Das Erkenntnisinteresse betrifft die Frage danach, welches die Aufgaben der jeweiligen Wissensbildung sein sollen. Das Gegen- standsverständnis bezieht sich auf die Arten der Fragen, die in einer Wissenschaft als angemessen gelten. Das Wissensideal fokussiert die Art von Antworten, die als zufriedenstellend erachtet werden. Schließlich geht es beim Aufgabenverständnis einer Wissenschaft darum, die Frage zu klären, welche Art von Praxis das Wissen überhaupt ermöglichen soll (Kempf 2003, 62ff.).

herische Relevanz sowie die kritische Reflexion und Ausdifferenzierung fraglos hingenommener Sachverhalte und Einstellungen voraussetzt (Llaryora 1994). Die Assimilationsforderung ist doppeldeutig: Zum einen ist sie universell ("Alles für die Bildung", Esser 2004, 210), zum anderen enthält sie insofern Elemente eines autoritären Diskurses, als jede Abweichung vom Vorgegebenen als äußerst problematisch eingestuft, als individuelles Unvermögen stilisiert, ja in der Logik des Modells quasi mit Sanktionen belegt wird. Es ist beinahe ergreifend, wie einprägsam komplexe Bildungsproblematiken von Kindern mit Migrationsbiographien umgangssprachlich und autoritär zugleich wiedergegeben werden: "Wer hier nicht gleich mithält und wer keinen langen Atem hat, bleibt im Rennen auf der Strecke" (Esser 1998, 133). "Wer nach dem Einreisealter auch nur ein wenig zu spät kommt, den hat das Leben eigentlich ganz früh bestraft. Man kann schon fast die Uhr danach stellen, und jeder Monat zählt" (Esser 2004, 212). Die Bereitschaft zur Investition in Bildung erscheint mehr oder minder als eine den Migrant(inn)en innewohnende Eigenschaft. Erfolg hat derjenige, der erfolgsorientiert ist, also nachhaltig in Bildung investiert. Man hat es folglich – wie Klaus Holzkamp (1970, 114) es in einem methodologischen Beitrag mit Fritz Reuters Worten treffend zum Ausdruck brachte – mit einer zirkelverdächtigen Denkbewegung zu tun, wobei das theoretische Operieren mit derartigen Verdopplungen nicht allzu verschieden ist von der Feststellung, dass die Armut eben von der Powerteh (poverty?) herkom- me! Der Assimilationsdiskurs richtet den Blick einseitig auf die Migrant(inn)en als "Problemgruppe", macht sie "empirisch sicht- bar" (Nassehi 2001, 11) und fungiert somit als Ablenkungsmanöver von den tatsächlichen Problemen von Minderheiten und Einheimischen in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft, die sich zumindest hinsichtlich der Konkurrenz um die knappen Leben- schancen und Güter im Prinzip wenig unterscheiden. Es handelt sich um einen Diskurs, der hauptsächlich als Diskussion über die Chancen und Gefahren für die Systemintegration der deutschen Gesellschaft und für die deutsche Nationalökono- mie geführt wird, wobei "das kolonisierte Andere" (Ha 2003) durch moderne Sozialdisziplinierung gebändigt werden soll. Durchaus ergänzend zu aktuellen politischen Debatten, die die gesellschaftliche Akzeptanz der Einwanderung von Vorteilen für Deutschland abhängig machen, verhalten sich Formulierungen wie z.B.: "… dass eine wirkliche Integration nur gelingen kann, wenn die ethnischen Gruppen über Dinge verfügen, die für die einheimische Gesellschaft von Interesse sind" (Esser 1998, 133). Folgt man den vorangegangenen Darlegungen, so bliebe wohl für eine Migrationsforschung jenseits des Mainstreams die Konsequenz, die ideologisch motivierte Verschleierung des Assimilationsansatzes aufzudecken und zu versuchen, dem ent- gegenzuwirken. Doch würde man dabei schnell merken, dass Kernargumente dieses Ansatzes nicht falsch sind: Keiner kann nämlich die Bedeutung des Erwerbs von Bildungsqualifikationen für Migrantenkinder und die Notwendigkeit ihrer Platzie- rung auf dem (primären) Arbeitsmarkt bestreiten. Versuchte man gar, die Wichtigkeit einer diesbezüglichen Förderung der Migrantenkinder in Frage zu stellen, würde man sich sträflich unglaubwürdig machen. Unsystematische, emotional gela- dene Anti-Assimilationsdiskurse sind genauso wenig ergiebig wie ein unreflektierter Rückzug auf den Wert einer multikul- turellen Gesellschaft an sich. Die Logik dieses Ansatzes ist vielmehr von innen zu beleuchten, indem man den latenten Gehalt der gesamten Argumen- tation ins Zentrum der Analyse rückt, d.h. den Fokus der Kritik darauf legt, was der Assimilationsansatz verschweigt: Zwar werden die (sogenannten) notwendigen individuellen Voraussetzungen für die Integration auffallend ausführlich debattiert; strukturelle, in der Aufnahmegesellschaft selbst liegende Integrationsbarrieren jedoch werden systematisch ausgeblendet. Wie wird z.B. die Tatsache bewertet, dass Jugendliche mit Migrationshintergrund im Vergleich zu ihren deutschen Alters- genossen selbst bei gleicher schulischer Qualifikation schlechtere Chancen auf dem Ausbildungsmarkt haben? Neuere Un- tersuchungen (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung 2005; M. Granato 2005; M. Granato/Soja 2005; Meyer 2003; Haeberlin et. al. 2004; Lehmann u.a. 2005) zeigen, dass der Faktor ‚ethnische Herkunft’ eine entscheidende Barriere beim Zugang zu einer beruflichen Qualifikation darstellt. Die schulischen Bildungsvoraussetzungen gelten demnach nicht mehr als (allgemeiner) Erklärungsansatz für die geringen Partizipationschancen von Schulabgängern mit Migrationshintergrund (Boos-Nünning 2006).

2.3 Wider die Zweisprachigkeit aus ‚Mangel an Beweisen’ – Zum Teufelskreis der Mainstream-Migrations- forschung am Beispiel der aktuellen Bilingualismusdebatte Nach sorgfältiger Durchsicht und Re-Analyse mehrerer internationaler Studien zeigt Esser (2006) auf, dass die Interdepen- denz-Hypothese, wonach muttersprachliche Kompetenzen merkliche Wirkungen auf den Zweitspracherwerb und auf die kognitiven Fähigkeiten sowie schulischen Leistungen von Migrantenkindern hätten (vgl. Cummins 2003; Reich/Roth 2002; Gogolin/Neumann/Roth 2003), empirisch nicht belegt ist. Es gebe bisher nicht eine, "den methodischen Regeln der Kunst entsprechende" (Esser 2006, 532) Studie, die es erlauben würde, die Frage nach der Wirksamkeit der bilingualen Maßnah- men verlässlich zu beurteilen. Programme zur Förderung der muttersprachlichen Kompetenzen, um so die Bildungs- probleme der Migrantenkinder zu beheben, seien deshalb wissenschaftlich nicht (mehr) vertretbar, ja sie legitimierten den für ihre Realisierung erforderlichen zeitlichen und materiellen Aufwand nicht. Zwar wirkten sich zweisprachige Maßnahmen

generell nicht negativ aus, sie könnten aber auch nicht Cummins Hypothese stützen, wonach die Zweitsprache nur im Rah- men der ersten zu erlernen sei. Vertreter bilingualer Erziehungsprogramme seien bei ihren Versuchen lediglich von materiellen Interessen ("vested interests") geleitet: "Ja, ich meine, es gibt natürlich Geld dafür, dass man das macht. Die Programme, da sind ja Leute mit beschäftigt. Ich meine, es gibt ganze Verbände, die auf dieser Grundlage arbeiten usw. Es gibt ganze erziehungswissenschaftliche Fakultäten, die damit beschäftigt sind. Also mir ist das kein Geheimnis, warum man sozusagen aufgeregt ist" (Esser 2007). Zwar erscheint es auf den ersten Blick so, als würden sich die beiden – hier nur kurz skizzierten – theoretischen Positionen in ihren wissenschaftlichen Auffächerungen wesentlich voneinander unterscheiden. Bei genauerer Betrachtung erweist sich jedoch, dass sie kaum divergieren. Eher das Gegenteil ist der Fall, und man könnte meinen, dass sie sich sogar recht kom- plementär zueinander verhalten: Im Rahmen beider Diskurse werden Bedingungen gesucht, die sich positiv auf die kognitiven Fähigkeiten und die Schulleistungen der Migrantenkinder auswirken. Und es wird hauptsächlich der technischen Verwertbarkeit von Wissensbildung eine Schlüsselrolle bei der Legitimation und Begründung der Angemessenheit des eigenen Ansatzes konzediert. So wird einerseits nach empirischen Beweisen für die förderliche Wirkung ethnischer Res- sourcen gesucht, um dadurch die Effektivität von bilingualen Maßnahmen zu begründen. Andererseits wird das Ausbleiben von ‚ausreichenden’ Belegen für die Wirksamkeit muttersprachlicher Kompetenzen als ‚empirischer Beweis’ für die Begründ- ung einer monolingualen Ausrichtung pädagogischer Interventionen hingestellt. Die Tatsache, dass in einer Studie (Vedder 2005) gezeigt wurde, dass sprachliche Assimilation bei Migrantenkindern den Effekt des positiven Selbstwertgefühls nach sich ziehe1, wird z.B. zum Anlass dafür genommen, die eigene Position zu stützen und entsprechende Forderungen für eine assimilationskonforme Praxis zu unterbreiten. Es wird zwar – nicht zu Unrecht – darauf hingewiesen, dass man "gerade in der Migrations- und Integrationsforschung mit ihren unter Umständen weitreichenden, ideologisch und emotional stark besetzten und auch kostenträchtigen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Konsequenzen" (Esser 2006, 540) gut beraten wäre, "hier etwas sorgfältiger zu sein, als es man- chmal wenigstens den Anschein hat" (ebd.). Die Forderung nach mehr Sorgfalt bezieht sich hier jedoch lediglich auf den Umgang mit methodischen Designs zur präziseren Kontrolle von Effekten.2 Der Assimilationsdiskurs (in Theorie und Forsc- hungspraxis) zieht sich offenbar auf das Postulat der Wertfreiheit von Wissenschaft zurück, deren Aufgabe darin besteht, ‚wahre’ Erkenntnisse zu liefern und auf dieser Basis Vorschläge für die optimalere Verwendung dieses Wissens in der Praxis zu erarbeiten. Wirft man in diesem Zusammenhang die Frage nach der potenziellen Überzeugungskraft von pädagogischen Vorschlägen sowie ihren faktischen Umsetzungschancen auf, so lässt zumindest die bisherige Geschichte der Ausländerbe- schäftigung eindeutig erkennen, dass sich eine assimilationsorientierte Interventionspragmatik in dieser Angelegenheit deutlich im Vorteil befindet: Ihre pädagogischen Forderungen können von Kreisen der Bildungspolitik leichter aufgegriffen werden, weil Interventionen, die unmittelbar darauf abzielen, Migrant(inn)en dazu zu bringen, etwas Bestimmtes zu sein oder etwas Bestimmtes zu tun, ungemein greifbar3 und mit relativ geringerem Aufwand zu realisieren sind. Eine pädago- gische Praxis hingegen, die eine Erweiterung der Verwirklichungschancen bzw. Realfreiheiten der Adressaten anstrebt, ist wohl nach herkömmlichen Messmethoden recht schwer hinsichtlich ihrer Effektivität zu beurteilen.

3. Subjektbezogene Migrationsforschung und Befähigungsgerechtigkeit als Perspektiven für die Interkul- turelle Bildung Erforderlich für die Migrationsforschung ist eine solche Erweiterung des Gegenstandverständnisses der an der Wissensbil- dung beteiligten wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, die nicht Fragen nach den Bedingungen und Effekten in den Vordergrund stellt, sondern vielmehr Fragen nach den subjektiven Handlungsgründen und Lebensinteressen der Migrant(inn)en selbst. Diese Erweiterung des Gegenstandsverständnisses muss mit einem Erkenntnisinteresse einhergehen, welches die Aufga- ben der Wissensbildung nicht auf die technische Verwertbarkeit des Wissens fokussiert, sondern auf die Gewinnung eman-

1. " … von einer besonderen förderlichen Wirkung der ethnischen Ressourcen, hier speziell: der Bedeutung muttersprachlicher Fertig- keiten und (exklusiv) binnenethnischer Netzwerke, also keine Rede sein … Hier und da gibt es zwar einige Hinweise darauf, dass sich wenigstens das Selbstwertgefühl verbessere. Aber auch dazu gibt es anders lautende empirische Ergebnisse, und merkliche Wirkungen auf die "fitness" in der Schule und auf dem Arbeitsmarkt haben diese subjektiven Gefühle nicht" (Esser 2006, 539). 2. Es wäre fatal, wenn Migrationsforscher(innen) aus einem ihnen aufgezwungenen ‚Beweisdruck’ heraus ihre künftige Aufgabe darin sehen würden, all diejenigen nach "den Regeln der Kunst" gewonnenen Gemeinplätze in Frage zu stellen oder sogar substanziell zu übertreffen: "Für die zunächst sprachliche und darüber dann deutlich erleichterte strukturelle Integration ist nach allem, was man zu den sozialen Bedingungen des Zweitspracherwerbs weiß, daher ein möglichst frühzeitiger Zugang zu alltäglichen und zwanglo- sen interethnischen Kontakten zentral wichtig" (Esser 2006, 539); "Der einzige wirklich stabile Effekt ist die unverzichtbare, wenngleich natürlich allein auch nicht schon hinreichende Bedeutung der sprachlichen Akkulturation an das Aufnahmeland für den Bildungs- und Arbeitsmarkterfolg" (ebd.). 3. Nicht zuletzt wegen ihrer Plastizität und ihres schlagwortartigen Charakters werden solche Thesen in der Presse durchaus positiv aufgenommen: Multikulturelle Gewohnheiten brächten nichts, die Beherrschung der Muttersprache sei lediglich ein zusätzlicher "netter Luxus" (FAZ vom 13.02.2008, "Die Schule der Türken").

zipatorischen Reflexionswissens abzielt. An erster Stelle steht dabei das Bemühen, die Bedingungen dafür zu schaffen, dass Migrant(inn)en ihre Schwierigkeiten besser verstehen und bewältigen können. Orientiert sich die Aufgabe der Wissensbildung an der Gewinnung emanzipatorischen Reflexionswissens und richtet man das Wissensideal daran aus, dann ändern sich auch das Gegenstandsverständnis und das Untersuchungsdesign von Mig- rationsstudien entsprechend radikal. Gefordert ist ein methodologischer Ansatz, welcher der gesellschaftlichen Vermittelt- heit individueller Subjektivität gerecht wird (Kempf 1992). Gegenstand subjektbezogener empirischer Migrationsforschung in diesem methodologischen Sinne (Baros 2001, Baros/Reetz 2002, Baros 2006b, Reetz 2007) sind nicht die Migrant(inn)en als Individuen, sondern ihre Lebensbedingungen, wie sie sie erfahren. Dementsprechend sind subjektwissenschaftliche Aussagen keine Aussagen über oder Kategorisierungen von Migrant(inn)en, sondern solche über Handlungsmöglichkeiten und -behinderungen (Baros 2006a). Aufgabe subjektwissenschaftlicher Empirie ist es dann, in einem Begründungsdiskurs (Holzkamp 1996) Hypothesen über Handlungsprämissen von Subjekten (im Migrationskontext) aufzustellen und sie im Rah- men eines intentionalen Erklärungsmodells empirisch zugänglich zu machen (Kempf 1998). Folgt man diesen methodologischen Darlegungen, so erscheint auch die Kontroverse über die Bedeutung von Zweispra- chigkeit in einem neuen Licht: Bilingual-bikulturelle Konzepte sind weder durch den Nachweis "straffer Zusammenhänge" (etwa im Sinne der Interdependenzhypothese) zu begründen noch ist die Bedeutung von Zweisprachigkeit angesichts feh- lender empirischer Beweise abzustreiten. Eine systematische Förderung von bilingual-bikulturellen Konzepten kann als grundsätzlich notwendig definiert werden, mit dem Ziel, die kulturellen und ethnischen Entscheidungsmöglichkeiten der nachwachsenden Generationen zu erweitern. Werden also (auch) muttersprachliche Kompetenzen systematisch gefördert, so wird man auch der Forderung gerecht, die unterschiedlichen und ungleichen Fähigkeiten und Spielräume in den Blick zu nehmen, die es Kindern und Jugendlichen mit Migrationshintergrund erlauben, Perspektiven zu entwickeln und Entschei- dungen zu treffen über das Leben, das sie führen wollen. Im Sinne einer Capability-Perspektive – wie sie von Amartya Sen und Martha Nussbaum konzipiert und vom Bielefelder Center for Education and Capability Research um Hans-Uwe Otto für die Erziehungswissenschaft rezipiert und erweitert wurde – sollte es darum gehen, Entfaltungspotentiale und bilingual-bikulturelle Lebenschancen von Menschen im Sinne ihrer Möglichkeiten zur Wahl und Gestaltung ihres Lebens zu stärken, d.h. Bedingungen definieren, die erfüllt sein müssen, damit Menschen in die Lage versetzt werden, ein für sie mit guten Gründen erstrebenswertes Leben führen zu können (Nussbaum 1999, Otto/Ziegler 2006, Baros/Otto 2008). Anstatt einer ‚Beobachterperspektive’, die die Ziele der Migrant(inn)en von außen dekretiert, soll für die Interkulturelle Bil- dung einer Perspektive der Vorzug gegeben werden, nach welcher die betroffenen Menschen selbst beurteilen sollen, welche Zustände und Lebensweisen sie als wünschenswert erachten. Es kann also weder darum gehen, Menschen zu einer bestimmten Form der Lebensführung zu drängen, noch darum, ihre Glücks- und Zufriedenheitsgefühle zu erhöhen (vgl. hierzu auch Schrödter 2007, 11ff.). Der Capabilities-Approach setzt genau an der Schnittstelle zwischen den gesellschaftlichen Möglichkeiten und dem subjektbezogenen Raum der individuellen Fähigkeiten des einzelnen an. Beide zusammen bestimmen die objektiven Chancen der Subjekte auf Wohlergehen und damit auf ein gutes, gelingendes oder ‚glückseliges’ Leben (vgl. Otto/Ziegler 2006; Andresen/Otto/Ziegler 2007). Unter Capabilities1 werden zunächst ganz allgemein die tatsächlich realisierbaren Fähigkeiten von Menschen zum Handeln und Gestalten innerhalb eines sozial und institutionell strukturierten Möglichkeitsraums verstanden. Auf (Migranten-)Kinder, (Migranten-)Jugendliche und ihre Familien bezogen lässt sich in diesem Sinn die Frage klären, wie über Bildung und Befähi- gung dauerhafte Verfestigungen sozialer Nachteile vermieden bzw. Möglichkeiten geschaffen werden können, die es ihnen erlauben, ein Leben zu führen, für das sie sich selbst mit guten Gründen entscheiden können. In dieser Hinsicht eröffnet der Befähigungsansatz einen analytisch fundierten Blick auf praktisch realisierbare Handlungsmöglichkeiten und sozial-, kulturell-, politisch bzw. ökonomisch bedingte Zugänge, Berechtigungen und Chancen zum Handeln. Ein wesentliches Mo- ment des Ansatzes besteht in der Unterscheidung zwischen physischen, psychischen und sozialen ‚Funktionsweisen’ von Kindern und Jugendlichen (was sie aktuell tatsächlich ‚tun’ und ‚sind’) und ihren Fähigkeiten, Kompetenzen oder Vermögen im Sinne der Möglichkeiten, die ihnen offen stehen, um für ihr Leben (bzw. ihre Lebensziele) wertvolle Daseinsformen und

1. Der Terminus "Capabilities" bezeichnet Möglichkeiten, die Personen für ihr Handeln und ihr Sein zur Verfügung stehen. Central Capabilities sind die Grundbedingungen, die für ein menschenwürdiges Leben notwendig und förderlich sind. Die Liste der Grund- bedingungen umfasst nach Martha Nussbaum zehn Aspekte: 1. lebenswertes Leben von normaler Dauer zu leben; 2. gesund sein können; 3. über den eigenen Körper verfügen können; 4. Sinne, Imagination, Denken; 5. Emotionen ausdrücken und zur Zunei- gung fähig sein können; 6. eine Vorstellung vom Guten entwickeln können; 7. in Gemeinschaft mit Selbstachtung leben können; 8. in Sorge zu und in Verbindung mit Tieren, Pflanzen und der Naturwelt leben können; 9. Muße erleben, spielen können; 10. politische und materielle Kontrolle über die eigene Umgebung ausüben können. Diese Capabilities seien universell, in ihrer Konkretisie- rung jedoch individuell und kulturgebunden.

Tätigkeiten realisieren zu können (capabilities).1 Eine konstruktive Herausforderung für eine Interkulturelle Erziehung auf der Basis eines Befähigungsansatzes liegt genau in der praktischen Gestaltung und Erweiterung dieser Handlungsfähig- keiten und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten, die sich in Form von Verwirklichungschancen junger Menschen niederschlagen. Wäh- rend Benachteiligung aus einer solchen Befähigungsperspektive dann vor allem als ‚Mangel an Verwirklichungschancen’ zu verstehen ist, ist der Wert bilingual-bikultureller Maßnahmen für Kinder und Jugendliche daran zu messen, ob diese Chan- cen erhöht worden sind. Unter ‚Verwirklichungschancen’ werden Autonomiegewinne verstanden, die junge Menschen dazu befähigen, mit Gründen erstrebte Lebensentwürfe real verwirklichen, d.h. ein als sinnvoll erkanntes Leben führen zu kön- nen. Für eine emanzipatorische, subjektbezogene Migrationsforschung bedeutet dies eine Orientierung an den Chancen von In- dividuen, ein für sie wünschenswertes Leben zu verwirklichen. Diese Chancen werden weder einseitig in den individuellen Fähigkeiten gesehen noch abstrakt in den strukturellen Bedingungen gesucht. Es kommt vielmehr darauf an, einen empirischen Zugang zu wählen, welcher es ermöglicht, die Frage nach der Vermittlung zwischen (objektseitig definierten) Rand- bedingungen und (subjektseitig definierten) Prämissen menschlichen Handelns (in der Migration) gezielt zu untersuchen (vgl. Kempf 1992). Dabei darf nicht ein abstraktes Streben nach Wahrheit als Selbstzweck das forschungsleitende Prinzip sein. Im Vordergrund soll das Interesse an einer erfolgreichen Praxis stehen, dessen capability-orientierte Ausrichtung als Befähigungsgerechtigkeit ein entsprechend erweiterter Möglichkeitsraum ist, der in seiner individuellen Verfügbarkeit Na- vigationsoptionen für die jeweilige Lebensführung im Kontext einer strukturellen Verwirklichungsgerechtigkeit zulässt (Ba- ros/Otto 2008).

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Zum Autor: Baros, Wassilios, Dr. paed., Hochschullehrer für Interkulturelle Bildung und Erziehung an der Demokritos Universität (Grie- chenland); Kooperationspartner des Bielefeld Center for Education and Capability Research; Lehrbeauftragter für interkulturelle Bildungs- forschung, Universität zu Köln. Arbeitsgebiete: Interkulturelle Kommunikation und Konfliktforschung, Interkulturelle Bildung, qualitative Sozialforschung, Migration und Capabilities.

Adresse: [email protected]